Ok, so here is my view of our first day, just as much for pleasing all of you, as it is to summarize the day for my own sake.

First off today was Bill Gates KeyNote. He announced that this was the very last time he would hold the KeyNote at TechEd since he is now retiring as chairman of Microsoft. Mathias has stated the details below in his post.

He held a good key note where he divided the field of development in three sections:

- Presentation where one key thing is to bridge and ease the connection between designers and developers. It will be easier to have designers doing the UI parts and then connecting this to the work done by the developers. The big buzz words are WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation and it's subset Silverlight which is making its way to Mobile devices as well.

- Business logic where Visual Studio offers new ways of visualizing the architecture of your applications and systems, and actually validating your design in order to easily find design flaws. So a lot is in the loop when it comes to architecture tools in order to ease the design of larger systems.

- Data where MS SQL server 2008 is the big product. Focus in this area is on centralizing storage points and provide better synchronizations between clients (mobile, PC based etc).

One large area which BG also mentioned and which seems to lie close to his heart, is robotics. MS is currently developing a suite of tools specifically aimed at robotics development. During the show a two wheel balancing robot with a TFT screen head showing a picture of MS CEO Steve Balmer entered the stage and did some tricks. MS sees robotics as one field that will grow extremely fast during the next years. They made the analogy that robotics is today where PC:s where 30 years ago.

My first session today (Debugging tough kernel and device driver issues) unfortunately got cancelled and I attended a session on maximizing your use of Visual Studio IDE. So now I know all the tips and tricks on working effectively with the IDE. The lecturer was a guy who has previously worked with Borland since the early 90:s and been part of their whole development line of IDE:s such as Delphi.

We also attended one session describing the .NET Compact Framework Powertoys which described a few tools for doing performance and memory analysis on .NET CF apps for mobile devices.

I also attended the Silverlight session described by Mathias below. It became clear during the presentation that Silverlight 1.0 is only the beginning. Silverlight 1 is based on javascripts and means that you cannot really interact with the platform running Silverlight. Silverlight 2.0 (upcoming release later this year) will be totally based on the .NET framework and will give you much more power.

Peter and I then did a lab where we learned how to create our own custom drawn components for in .NET framework to create compelling Windows Mobile user interfaces. It was a good opportunity to get some insight in how the graphic components works.

The lecture about the future of multi/many core was more aimed at large computer clusters and was focused on MS upcoming HPC server for building giant clusters. But we also got an insight on the difficulties on parallel computing and how MS tries to aid by developing new tools for for instance debugging. But there is still a long way to go here. MS stated though that this is the only way to go since we are hitting the roof when it comes to CPU speed, cache size effects and CPU pipelining. So we must overcome the obstacles of parallel computing in order to get that extra performance. I asked the question on where we are going when it comes to parallel computing in embedded devices, and got the answer that since the frameworks (.NET) on top are getting new components for parallel computing, the underlying kernels will be adopted for parallel computing as well, even for embedded devices.

The day ended by walking around talking to MS partners and learning what they do and how they can help us. We collected some tips on how we at YAHM can set up a lab environment to learn the MS embedded tools and environment better.

And hey, they served free beer! :o)