So the show is on the road again. Falafel has a booth (come visit us), as do all the usual suspects, we met our friends at Telerik, Developer Express etc. The FU T-shirts and Sumo wrestlers are going like hot cake, thanks Matt for making us look good!

The Keynote this morning was a big aha moment from me. Its all about the cloud, which for Microsoft is Windows Azure. Very exciting, they have been busy and come along way since last year. The new SQL Azure service behave just like SQL Server, and you can even use SQL Server Management Studio to work with it using your familiar Transact SQL commands. Also, the development tools, management and monitoring tools, deployment etc are shaping up nicely.

The PDC drop of RIA Services for VS 2010 and .NET Fwk 4/ Entity Fwk 4 is looking very capable, will find out more about that on Thursday.

Now attending a talk on ADO.Net Data Services and .NET Entity Framework. They have done tons of work here since version 2.0. There is model first development (generate the DB from the model), support for POCO classes and change tracking, much better SQL generation and support for executing customized SQL and stored procedures.

Day 2: Wow! Microsoft just released Silverlight 4.0, and it has ALL the features that were missing! I don’t even know where to start! Here is a quick list: supports rich printing, access to external devices, access to webcam and microphone, can run in trusted mode and access file system and cross domain network access, does HTML in OOB mode, full OOB window management support (custom windows chrome), drag and drop files into the SL app, play flash inside the SL app, expanded WCF support (net tcp), right click, improved theming, improved data binding, runs full .net fwk assemblies, twice as fast…. what do you think? Seems like a go? It is beta now and RTM first half of 2010.

Oh – and today Microsoft scored big points by giving all the paying attendees a laptop! That drew some standing ovations at the keynote.

Day 3: Attended “Building Amazing Business Applications with Silverlight 4 and RIA Services” with Brad Abrams, Program Unit Manager. Very slick tooling and designer support! Nice implementation of server and client side filtering, and composing client side operations (filtering, sorting, paging) with server side execution.

I will update this blog as I find out more.