This week's excitement continues...

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In addition to the products that we released earlier this week (see my previous blog), there are also a couple of other things we made available that are exciting to developers. We announced these in Las Vegas (VSConnections) and Barcelona (TechEd Developer event at Europe):

·  Visual Studio 2005 extensions for the .NET Framework 3.0 - a series of plug-ins and project templates that enable developers to use Visual Studio 2005 to build .NET Framework 3.0 solutions.

· Beta 2 of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions and the Microsoft Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) Library (collectively called ASP.NET AJAX), formerly codenamed “Atlas”

· Release candidate of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, a new offering for essential relational database functionality in a compact footprint.

Best of all we have seen a number of customers already adopting a lot of the products and technologies that we released this week. Here are some examples of customer adoption:

· Mail order and online consumer purchasing leader OTTO is using the power of Windows Vista to create a new shopping experience for more than 10 million retail customers. Using WPF, CardSpace and technologies such as Sidebar, they can now provide instant information to both consumers and partners alike with a 3D shopping experience.

· Burton Snowboards has redeveloped their on-line presence using ASP.NET AJAX to deliver the optimal user experience that their customers are demanding. We are also seeing many customers using the Native components of Vista to increase the security and functionality of their solutions.

· A consortium called PASS (Pay as a Secure Service) which includes IP Commerce, PayPal, BankServe, CIT, CashEdge, ICC Net, Chase Payment Tech is helping provide a greater financial management system to the end user. Specifically IPCommece is providing a Vista SOA-based infrastructure for the payments industry that can be utilized for hosting payments networks, connecting services, devices and applications, and breaking down the traditional barriers between financial institutions, payment service providers and businesses.

I think Scott Guthrie said it best at his VSConnections keynote last week - “By embracing trends such as AJAX and delivering new technologies for Windows and Microsoft Office, we are opening the door to entirely new levels of innovation in the software industry while still allowing developers to use their existing skill sets.”

Namaste!