Microsoft exec: We're building bridges with Dynamic IT

Steve Guggenheimer, general manager of Microsoft's Application Platform and
Development marketing division, talked about a range of technologies under construction
at the company during a keynote address on Monday, including Microsoft's Dynamic
IT initiative and virtualization.

"We're trying to work on those bridges that cut across all of our different
roles," Guggenheimer said at Microsoft's DevConnections conference in Las
Vegas, in a keynote address titled "Dynamic IT and the 2008 Launch Wave."
The company has been touting the Dynamic IT initiative, which encompasses everything
from applications to infrastructure, since its Tech Ed conference earlier this
year.

The company only recently began getting specific about how it intends to execute
its plans. Perhaps playing to skeptics, at one point during the keynote the
audience saw an offbeat promotional video for Visual Studio 2008, which is set
for release this month.

The video carried the tagline "True Development Story" and was themed
in part like an expose segment on a nighty news magazine. The clip featured
a man dressed as a pompous, pipe-waving pseudo-intellectual, who voiced blustering
skepticism over the various promised features in the new product. This was interspersed
with comments from Microsoft officials about how the company used its own Visual
Studio and Team System tools -- or in the parlance, "dog-fooded" --
to create the new version.

Guggenheimer's presentation also covered the company's strategy for virtualization,
which ranges from the desktop to server and application virtualization.

Later, Guggenheimer talked about Microsoft's plans for its data platform, touching
at some length on business intelligence.

"A lot of people think about BI as something you have added on top of
your platform," he said. Microsoft wants to provide something it calls
"pervasive insight" -- BI for everyone. "We're trying to take
all that data and make it available throughout the company and to all types
of users," he said.

Ram Ramanathan, a product manager for SQL Server, showed off some of the new
features in SQL Server 2008. Using spatial data, which is supported in SQL Server
2008, he built a simple application depicting the location of coffee shop franchises
along a highway.

The audience also received a runthrough of Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-platform
browser plug-in for rich Internet applications and content. Guggenheimer noted
that there are hooks for Web applications and scenarios throughout Microsoft's
range of technologies.

Guggenheimer wrapped up his talk with a quick overview of Oslo, Microsoft's
vision for model-driven development of composite applications. "We
all use models today. Just in different tools and different languages,"
he said. Oslo's goal is to provide a unified framework for modeling applications.
Microsoft has provided no firm timeframe for Oslo.

Microsoft claimed 5,000 attendees for the Connections event, which is being
held at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas.

Guggenheimer encouraged the audience to play with the new technologies and
sound off. "We listen, we give feedback and decide where to place the bets,"
he said.