Microsoft New Zealand Tech-Ed 2010 is easily the biggest IT event in the country and like previous years aims to be bigger and better!

Some of what’s being planned for Microsoft New Zealand Tech-Ed 2010:

IT" “Rock Star” Speakers

We’ve listened to your feedback and are seeking to bring a number of the very best technical presenters to New Zealand. Already confirmed for the Tech-Ed Keynote is Microsoft UX Director, August de los Reyes.

Hands On Labs

This year the hands-on labs will feature a new architecture for improved stability and performance.

New Marketplace

We’re working hard to make the Tech-Ed Marketplace fantastic in 2010! A new layout, more interactive activities, new “zones” and great exhibition stands are amongst the plans.

Exclusive Product Offers

We’re working with our event partners to deliver some great product offers, exclusive to Tech•Ed delegates! Watch this space…

Party

Once again we will be hosting the finest IT party of the year! We’re back at the Town Hall in 2010 and will be putting together a fabulous line-up of top New Zealand bands and entertainers.

Note that the above is subject to change!

Early bird registration has opened and provides ~ $300 saving for individual conference registrations and ~ $1500 saving for corporate conference registrations. Early bird tickets are limited and these normally go very quickly so get in quickly!

Asking yourself why you should attend Microsoft New Zealand Tech-Ed 2010?

Because you’ll return to the office with cutting-edge insights and expertise that will make life easier for you (and everyone else) at work. Immerse yourself in hundreds of IT learning opportunities, and collaborate with Microsoft innovators, third party leaders, and hundreds of your IT peers, building connections that will last well beyond your three days at Tech·Ed.

The conference agenda can be found here: http://newzealand.msteched.com/agenda with information on the technical tracks here: http://newzealand.msteched.com/tracks?… Track descriptions will be posted closer to time.

Sponsor or exhibitor information has also been posted and this can be found here: http://newzealand.msteched.com/becoming…

Early bird registrations do go quickly so get in quick and register!

Microsoft New Zealand will be launching Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure next month in Auckland and Wellington.

For those working in the software development area you might already be using Visual Studio 2010 RC and the production ready Windows Azure. This half-day event provides an insight into Visual Studio 2010 as well as an understand of Cloud Computing and Windows Azure. To help with this launch Microsoft New Zealand has lined up some excellent keynote speakers.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Our keynote presenter is Microsoft’s Sam Guckenheimer, author of Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Sam is the Group Product Planner for the Microsoft Visual Studio product line. In this capacity, he acts as chief customer advocate, responsible for the end-to-end external design of the next releases of these products.

Microsoft Windows Azure

In this presentation, David Chappell looks at the Windows Azure platform and what it means for organisations that create, use, or sell software. The topics he’ll cover include:

• An overview of the Windows Azure platform: Technology and business model
• Using the Windows Azure platform: Application scenarios
• The cloud platform context: Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, and more

David Chappell is Principal of Chappell & Associates in San Francisco, California. Through his speaking, writing, and consulting, he helps software professionals around the world understand, use, and make better decisions about new technologies.

Details for the Auckland and Wellington launches is as follows:

Auckland
Sky City Convention Centre
Auckland Room 2
88 Federal Street

Wellington
Holiday Inn Wellington
Grand Space
75 Featherston Street
Wellington

Both launches will follow the following schedule:

9 AM Registration
9:30 AM Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Keynote
10:45 AM Morning Tea
11 AM Microsoft Windows Azure Keynote
12:30 PM Concludes

You will have to register to attend these launches. Full information along with registration and speaker bio’s can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/nz/… I have registered and am looking forward to these launches. I have already been using both Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Windows Azure. Both are outstanding products that are on the cutting edge of technology so definitely head along to have a look and learn more if you don’t already use either of these.

It will also be great to hear David Chappell. David spoke as a keynote speaker at the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 which has just ended. His talk at the ESRI Developer Summit 2010 was around Cloud Computing as well so this will make for a great talk!

Microsoft® SQL Azure™ Database is a cloud-based relational database service built on SQL Server® technologies. It provides a highly available, scalable, multi-tenant database service hosted by Microsoft in the cloud. SQL Azure Database helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases. Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any software. High availability and fault tolerance is built-in and no physical administration is required.

This is great news for those living in the spatial world as it allows developers to take advantage of native Microsoft SQL Server data types in the cloud.

One of the biggest requests we received was to support spatial data in SQL Azure and that feature will be available for you in SU3 (June). Within this feature is support for the Geography and Geometry types as well as query support in T-SQL. This is a significant feature and now opens the Windows Azure Platform to support spatial and location aware applications.

Spatial data support is scheduled for the SU3 release which will be ~ June 2010 and it will work just like the spatial data support in Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

Same spatial data types, spatial methods and spatial indexes.  It works in SQL Server Management Studio just like you would expect.

Query performance is excellent.  In the above example, the query executed in under a second against a table containing over 1.8 million rows (GeoNames points-of-interest for the United States).

For users wanting to take advantage of Microsoft SQL Azure now, ESRI MapIt allows you to load as well as read and visualise data directly from the cloud. This is done through the use of XY’s.

There a few real differences between Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Azure. Ed Katibah explains these here: http://blogs.msdn.com/edkatibah/…

Spatial data support on Microsoft SQL Azure is great! This opens up the door to many developers and location aware applications. Location aware applications are becoming more and more popular and being able to utilise the cloud is a massive step forward.

Remember that in ArcGIS 10, query layers will allow you to read directly from Microsoft SQL Server 2008. You can then republish these as services. Theoretically this should be possible with data on Microsoft SQL Azure as well. I’ll run a few tests to see if this is the case but it’s definitely something to keep in mind.

As you can imagine, Microsoft servers are being hammered right now with the demand of Windows 7. This morning I grabbed Windows 7 Enterprise x86 and x64 versions.

I have been running Windows 7 Release Candidate for months now and things have been going very well. I am still using Windows 7 Release Candidate as my primary operating system on my work laptop with ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 and I haven’t had any problems.

Over the next few days I will install Windows 7 along with all the relevant ArcGIS 9.3.1 software. I will write up about this and if I encounter any problems.

In the meanwhile go download Windows 7

RTM officially happens only after sign-off occurs. What happens is a build gets designated as a RTM contender after going through significant testing and meeting our quality bar for RTM. Then, it goes though all the validation checks required for RTM including having all languages of that build completed. If all the validation checks have passed – sign-off for RTM can occur. Today after all the validation checks were met, we signed off and declared build 7600 as RTM.

To add to this great news, Microsoft also announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 has RTM’d as well.

The acronym stands for Release to Manufacturing, and it means this latest release of Windows Server 2008 R2 is now blessed by engineering as ready for the manufacturing process. We’re talking final code. Sun shining, birds singing, children dancing in the streets.

I have been running Windows 7 Release Candidate on my machines for the last few months. This includes machines at home and laptops at work. It’s been an extremely stable environment with ArcGIS 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Server 9.3.1.

So the question now is when can I get my hands on Windows 7?

• Partners & OEMS
  ISV’s and IHV’s – From Microsoft Connect, MSDN and TechNet on August 6th
  Microsoft Gold/Certified Partners – From Microsoft Partner Network Portal on August 16th

• Business Customers
  Volume License Customers – From Volume License Service Centre on August 7th
• IT Professionals
  Technet Subscribers – From TechNet on August 6th 
• Developers
  MSDN Subscribers – From MSDN on August 6th
• Consumers
  General availability on Windows 7 will be October 22nd where I’m sure there will be a massive worldwide launch.

Still two weeks to wait until we get our hands on the final copy of Windows 7. I am already making plans to re-install my laptop to Windows 7 RTM. Full information on the Windows 7 RTM announcement can be found here: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/…

For Windows Server 2008 R2, there are some great new features. I didn’t get around to trying the RC version so will have a play with the final soon. Full information on the Windows Server 2008 R2 announcement along with some of the new features can be found here: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/…

I’ll be doing an extensive test of ArcGIS 9.3.1 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 so stay tuned for updates.

Delivering on its commitment to help enable the creation and deployment of the world’s most compelling applications, Microsoft Corp. today launched Microsoft Silverlight 3 and Expression 3, combining groundbreaking new capabilities with simplified packaging to provide the industry’s leading media and rich Internet application (RIA) solution.

Silverlight 2 was released in October 2008. Since then the adoption of Silverlight has grown and we have started to see a number of sites making use of this technology. Silverlight 3 takes the technology to a whole new level.

Scott Guthrie has a nice write up talking about some of the new Silverlight 3 runtime capabilities. He write up touches on the following topics:

• HD Media
• Immersive Graphics
• Application Development
• Visual Studio 200 Tools for Silverlight 3
• Expression Studio 3

You can find his detailed write up about these topics here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/… The Microsoft press release on Silverlight 3 can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/…

Microsoft Silverlight 3 can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/. Also Microsoft has launched http://www.seethelight.com as a promotion site for Silverlight 3.

Earlier this afternoon, Microsoft launched Bing along with Bing Maps publically. Browsing http://www.bing.co.nz

or http://www.bing.com

On http://www.bing.com I notice Bing is a preview, while on http://www.bing.co.nz its a beta. Weird!

Initial thoughts is that Bing is fast, very fast in fact. I am impressed. Even the search results coming back are pretty good. I am still having a play but its looking good. Bing in the http://www.bing.com offers more features than http://www.bing.co.nz, so I am hoping Microsoft soon add these for some good local content.

One question I had, Bing doesn’t offer a “Did you mean?” like Google does? A very useful feature if you used Google to check spelling!

Bing Maps replaces Microsoft Local Live.

It’s essentially the same with just an updated brand look. The Microsoft Virtual Earth logo still exists at the bottom left as well. Should be replaced with Bing Maps for Enterprise.

All in all I am very impressed with the Bing! Lets hope Microsoft continues to add a bundle of features to this great new platform.

While the new Bing consumer brand is targeted towards the search market, Microsoft has renamed Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Live Search Maps was our consumer maps offering. This is the web site you go to for maps, aerial photos, directions, searching for points of interest and creating collections of your own personal data to store in the cloud. Live Search Maps is now called Bing Maps. Bing! That’s right, you know you’re going to do it every time you see the name. Bing! I digress.

local.live.com can now be referred to as Bing Maps!

Microsoft Virtual Earth was our enterprise mapping platform. This was the set of APIs you would leverage to embed maps into your web site along with overlay data in the form of pushpins, polygons, polylines, raster overlays, etc. etc. Microsoft Virtual Earth is now called “Bing Maps for Enterprise.”

Microsoft Virtual Earth can now be referred to as Bing Maps For Enterprise!

For some of the other services Microsoft offers, MapPoint Web Service and Photosynth. These will remain the same. http://www.bing.com should go live in the next few days. Microsoft is currently rolling the new brand, search platform out internally first.

I guess we will see ESRI updating their sites and documentation soon referring to Microsoft Virtual Earth as Bing Maps for Enterprise!

ArcGIS JavaScript™ Extension for Microsoft Virtual Earth™  = ArcGIS JavaScript™ Extension for Bing Maps for Enterprise™

Combine your organization’s GIS content hosted in ArcGIS Server with content from other organizations on top of Bing Maps For Enterprise™ base maps.

That just sounds weird!

The official press release on this new brand can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/… Microsoft Virtual Earth rebranding information can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/…

Microsoft servers are being hammered right now with the demand on Windows 7 Release Candidate. I was able to grab it install it and have it running. Windows 7 Release Candidate added a bundle more features along with quite a few bug fixes.

Virtual XP for Microsoft Windows 7 is also now available for download to MSDN and Technet users.

Will be installing ArcGIS 9.3.1 on Windows 7 soon on my primary laptop so will post updates about how that goes. In the meanwhile, go download Windows 7 RC

Microsoft will make Windows 7 Release Candidate available for public download ~ May 5th.

Service Pack 1 (SP1) contains all the cumulative updates and fixes issued since SQL Server 2008 was released in August 2008. It also makes it easier to deploy SQL Server 2008.  A few specific features have been added:

• A feature called Slipstream allows users to install the database and service pack at once, easing the process of loading the software onto hundreds or thousands of servers.
• Report Builder 2.0 Click Once eases deployment.
• Service Pack Uninstall is designed to allow administrators to uninstall the service pack separately from the database release.

Release notes for SP1 can be found here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/… Download SP1 from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…