TechEd 2013- Microsoft’s annual conference for developers and IT professionals – was held earlier this month. For those who were not able to attend this year, presentations from the conference are available online at the TechEd page.
Our Microsoft team attended the event and wanted to share key announcements with you we feel are relevant.
(1) Microsoft peels back the covers on “Blue” products
The “Blue” server-side products have been officially named- below is a list of the new names:
- Windows server “Blue” has been renamed Windows Server 2012 R2
- System Center “Blue” has been renamed System Center 2012 R2
- SQL Server “Blue” has been renamed SQL Server 2014
- Visual Studio “Blue” has been renamed Visual Studio 2013
- Windows “Intune” device management/security service to roll out concurrently with “Blue” products
Pricing plans have not been released yet- below is a timeline of these server-side product releases.
Timeline of releases
June 2013: Public preview versions of “Blue” products at Build 2013 conference, end of June
August-October 2013: Windows Blue released to manufacturing late summer/fall 2013
Dec 2013: Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and Visual Studio 2013 to be released end of calendar 2013, SQL Server 2014 to be released shortly after
(2) Important Visual Studio Updates via TFS
The new hybrid application lifecycle management (ALM) capabilities that will be incorporated into Visual Studio 2013 was released to testers, via Team Foundation Service.
The new TFS features released include:
- Agile Portfolio Management (enterprise agile project management)
- Team Room (improved team collaboration)
- Cloud Load Testing (ensuring quality, performance and scalability of applications)
- Code Commenting (accelerating team members’ ability to understand and interpret code, find and resolve faults, integrate)
- Enhanced Web Test Case Management features
(3) SQL Server Improvements are on the way
- Microsoft will be building its in-memory database technology, code named “Hekaton”, into the upcoming release
- Adding more high-availability “Always On” functionality on top of what it already provided in SQL Server 2012
- New and additional cloud-backup support to SQL Server 2014
For an in-depth review of the announcements made at TechEd, feel free to schedule time with your Softchoice Account Manager or Microsoft Enterprise Specialist- we are always happy to talk tech with our customers or review the following additional content.
For your convenience, here are a few other references we think are pretty useful.
Windows Server:
Windows Server product will include features that improve interoperability and integration with Windows Azure, Microsoft’s public cloud platform
Microsoft to bring new Azure cloud services to Windows Server
Windows Intune: