QuMIX, supplemental ;)

Martha Rotter Introduction

Martha is a DPE in Microsoft Ireland, and has a great background in the company. She previousily worked as a Lead SDET (Software Developement Engineer in Test) for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), and a Lead SDET for Silverlight. She has a great enuthasium for technology, and if you have any deep questions about Silverlight - shes the girl to ask!

XNA

XNA Game Studio Express is a new game development solution targeted primarily at students, hobbyists, and independent game developers. XNA Game Studio Express is based on Visual C# Express 2005 and lets developers create games for both Windows and Xbox 360. XNA Game Studio Express contains the following:

• The XNA Framework, a set of managed code development libraries that make it possible for game developers to be more productive when creating games for Windows and the Xbox 360.
• The XNA Framework Content Pipeline, a set of tools that allow developers to more easily incorporate 3D content into their games
• XNA Game Studio Express also contains a full set of documentation, how-tos, and starter kits that demonstrate how best to use the content pipeline and XNA Framework.
• XNA Game Studio Express runs side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio without interference
• XNA Game Studio Express has now been released, and can be found here. It supports both Windows and Xbox 360 game development.

Robotics Studio

The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. It's also the source of Martha's Power.

One day gone already, boy where does it go!

So we only really made it to the keynote and a hand's on tutorial before spending a good 2 hours looking for our hotel, then another hour getting back to the conference centre, but there was some good bits in the keynote.

Microsoft will release VisualStudio 2008 to MSDN (should probaly include MSDNAA) at the end of this month, a good 3 months before its RTR. If you are looking to run some Javascript projects, or update a few of your existing applications to .net 3.0 then its really worth picking this up as quickly as possible. The beta 2 release was very stable, so it can only get better.

They also demo'ed some new extensibility for VisualStudio, that will allow 3rd party companies to deploy modules to visualstudio, such as the already developed World of Warcraft mod editor. Which was surprisingly well intregrated and included things you would expect from visualstudio like full Intellisense and libarys.

They also talked a bit more popfly, and showed the new popfly explorer for visualstudio.