TechEd keynote this year is presented by S. Somasegar (Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division, Microsoft) and we've got some great seating not far from the stage (super early bid benefit).

 

 

In the first demo of the day they showed some of IDE and platform extension made to ASP.NET. The stuff highlighted didn't feel that new, with focus on using LINQ in a datasource control, javascript syntax highlighting and Intellisense, AJAX and Silverlight. The sample used was a grocery store and the Silverlight control was control where you could use to look at the groceries as if they were in the store.

Continuing the demo they showed how they improved the workflow integration and eased the debugging of workflows no matter what hosts the workflow as for example Sharepoint. Continuing the sample with how stages in the workflow would more effectively use Word as user interface and therefore extending a word document with a custom task pane. In the task pane they used a WPF control to show a picture of the product. Continuing with more Office integration (VSTO is now a standard part of VS Professional) they created a custom form region in an Outlook task that showed the store floor as a 3:D model that could be navigated by the store manager.

The next demo focused on the Visual Studio shell and it's extensibility. First Somasegar announced that they removed the requirement of license for extending visual Studio and that primary partner will get source code. Then Dan showed how they have used Visual Studio to build a World of Warcraft editor that gave you as a developer a very familiar environment with visual designers, xml Intellisense, Intellisense in the code and so on. This sample will be available as open source on codeplex.

In the future a CTP of next Visual Studio Team System with codename Rosario will be available this year and a Beta next year. The key theme that will be enabled with Rosario is "Build the right thing. Build it the right way.". They will deliver a deep integration with project server and team foundation server to enable better collaboration. The second big thing for them are to invest in is Quality Assurance to enable developers to build the right thing.

Somasegar ended his keynote with a slide with his commitments to you:

I guess that they are on the road to this, when the demo of the new features does not feel that new :).