Soma Somesgar opened TechEd Europe 2007 this afternoon with a 90 minute keynote. Mostly the keynote was a presentation of current or near current Microsoft technologies (visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, AJAX, WPF, Silverlight, PopFly) but here are a few of the points that I thought worth mentioning:-

• Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 will be available for download by MSDN subscribers before the end of November 2007. The official launch in the UK is next year but this is just a publicity exercise and has nothing to do with release dates.
• Over 90% of Visual Studio 2008 was built using msbuild. msbuild has been upgraded for Visual Studio 2008.
• The CTP of Microsoft Sync Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=35E8F16E-AAA4-4919-8B3C-1CE4EA1F6552&displaylang=en) was released today. Sync Framework provides offline synchronization for web services and databases and serves a similar purpose to the ADO briefcase model of yesteryear.
• Visual Studio 2008 Shell (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/bb510103.aspx) is available for free download and the release version will be available at the same time as Visual Studio 2008. Visual Studio 2008 Shell allows you to build IDE shells.
• The first draft of Microsoft’s Software + Services blueprint became available today. This includes an Outlook add-in that exposes your Outlook data to consumers.
• Microsoft will allow Visual Studio to be localized by the community for cultures that are not currently serviced by the 9 official languages supported by Visual Studio. This appears to be one of the results of Microsoft’s research project into machine translation.
• "Jazzed" is the new "super-excited". It is true that Soma did say he was "super-excited" during the keynote but it is only fair to say that this was in a video that was intended to be humorous and it was clearly Microsoft having a laugh at themselves. However, when he said he was "really jazzed about this" it was quite straight. Want to be part of the "in" crowd ? Start being "jazzed" about stuff. (I strongly suspect that I won’t ever be jazzed about anything though).

Technorati Tags: TechEd, Visual Studio 2008, .NET Framework 3.5, Microsoft Sync Framework, Visual Studio Shell, Software plus Services, Localization