Big day today, particularly if you are Andy. He is one of our students who only happens to be giving a big chunk of the TechEd keynote presentation today. Just me watching, along with five thousand other developers. The presentation itself started with some banging of the drum by Microsoft. Literally. On each seat was placed an ethnic drum device type thing for us to hit. Apparently, when in Amsterdam it is important to have a good bong, and so there were a bunch of folks at the front showing us how it is done.

Being part of five thousand other people whacking away on the drums was quite fun. After the rhythm, the conference proper started. And after a few minutes, there was Andy. Now people, bear mind that what we have here is someone who has just completed their second year computer science course at Hull. Well, all I can say is that he must have been paying a lot of attention. The presentation he gave was excellent. Well paced, authoritative and with just the right lightness of touch. Very impressive. Andy is working as an intern at Microsoft next year. I think he will give very good value for money.

What Andy was talking about was essentially one of the big pushes which Microsoft is making at the moment. Computing is coming home. In the Good Old Days (tm) you could, for minimal outlay, get hold of euqipment and tools with which you could teach yourself to write programs and explore the joy of building systems. Over the years as things have grown in complexity and expense this has become increasinly tricky. Until today. Microsoft are releasing little or no cost tools which let you explore programming. They even go as far as providing one of their flagship server products, SQL server, for people to,quite literally, play with at home.

From a teaching point of view this is great. From a "just plain having fun with computers" point of view this is great too. At a presentation following the keynote they were talking about most anybody building their own fully automated database driven application. This is really big stuff. Previously if you wanted to use the power of Visual Studio, the flagship Microsoft  development environment, you had to either be a student on a course which is part of Microsoft Academic Allliance or you had to stump up a lot of cash to get yourself to buy the tools.

The other thing which left me gobsmacked was the power of the tools themselvews. They have been constructed to make it even easier to build the applications and share work. I came in thinking "How much more can you make Visual Sutdio do?". I left thinking "A powerful lot". It was also very heartening to see that they place their development team (did I mention the team working tools) into three groups - the architect, the developer and the tester. To see features in a mainstream development environment which cover test management, code coverage assessment and all the other "proper"software development issues is just great.

There was also a lovely demo of how easy it is to use the new toolset to create, deploy and even sell a simple Smartphone application. The latest version of the software for the phones will include camera integration and the software will make it very easy to capture images and move them around.

All in all a somewhat inspring start. And, again, congratulations Andy for a really good gig.