Whidbey and Yukon and Orcas, Oh My
From Information Week:
Bill Gates and other executives kicked off Microsoft's meeting with financial analysts on Thursday with an overview of the company's development projects, which will be fueled in the current fiscal year by $6.8 billion in spending on research and development, an 8% increase over last year. "There's a strong product pipeline," said Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect
.
Microsoft execs outlined key products to be delivered over the next 12 months. They include:
- The Office 2003 suite, with the new OneNote and InfoPath for XML forms;
- An upgrade to the Tablet PC operating system;
- The first beta release of Longhorn;
- Service pack 2 for Windows XP;
- Versions of Windows Server 2003 and Office 2003 for small businesses;
- An upgrade to Microsoft's customer-relationship management application;
- Services For Unix, version 3.5; and
- Upgrades to Project Server, BizTalk Server, Speech Server, and ISA Server.
Well who the heck cares? We are developers! We care about the development tools. Good news is that I will speaking at VSLive in New York where Microsoft lays out plans for its upcoming 'Whidbey' and 'Orcas' versions of Visual Studio. Everyone can get a sneak preview of the next release of Visual Studio at the free keynote given by Senior VP Eric Rudder. If you cant make the keynote, there will be a new Development Tools Roadmap documents posted to MSDN on Tuesday.