Kevin.Deenanauth;

Time to be the billionth person to blog about the new upcoming Microsoft technology for 2008.

First of all, Visual Studio 2008 has already hit it’s RTM. Great since they are so far ahead of schedule.

I’ve just installed it at work today, so tomorrow I’ll have a chance to play with all the new features and report back.

SQL Server seems to be lagging behind, however I’m pretty excited about that also. They’ve got their November 2007 CTP ready to download.

They’ve added a bunch of new data types including specialized bitstreams for media files and data types to represent geographic locations. I really don’t care about those changes so much. I believe it’s all to help their search appliance, Microsoft Search 2008 get competitive with Google’s product. No, I am much more excited about the other direction of things: Microsoft Sync Framework. There’s been very limited hype over the technology surprisingly. I’ve been reading up and the only tutorial-esqe information appears to be from a Microsoft developer who has also written a Code Project article, Take Data Offline Using Microsoft Synchronization Services for ADO.NET. To go along with the sync framework is SQL Server Compact 3.5. Sometime next week I’ll be able to play with all this new stuff and write some articles about it.