More than 2 000 software developers descended on Durban's International Convention Centre this week, to get a closer look at the latest from Microsoft.
TechEd 2008 featured a number of international speakers, first looks at new products and hands-on sessions with Microsoft's development tools.
Keynote speaker Barry Briggs, CTO of Microsoft IT, said the way software development is done is evolving rapidly.
"Designers and developers are having to work more closely. There's a real shift going on here. New graphics cards and more processing power are enabling the next generation of applications, but technologies like Silverlight require designers to work much more closely with programmers."
Microsoft's Silverlight platform, which the company hopes will be a Flash killer, proved popular with delegates, with technical manuals flying off the shelves at the Intersoft book stand.
The company also made much of its Hyper-V virtualisation tool for Windows 2008, a free download that competes directly with VMware ESX and can now manage VMware virtual operating images.
"Microsoft internally runs over 2 000 lines of business applications," said Briggs. "At the moment, some 30% of those are running in a virtualised environment, but our goal is to move that up to 80%. As Microsoft's first and best customer, the internal IT department 'eats our own dogfood' by deploying and using our own products. Our financial year, which closed off at the end of June, was completed using an SAP application running on SQL Server 2008."
The company also showed off its RoundTable video conferencing product, which uses speech recognition and a 360-degree panoramic camera system.
Stephen Attenborough, commercial director of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, finished the event with a presentation on the future of space tourism, including a first-person perspective video of the maiden flight of engineer Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne.
The TechEd conference, which finished on Wednesday, was followed by Microsoft's annual Partner Summit, which runs until the end of the week.
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