I was only able to attend the viewing event at Microsoft’s Alpharetta, GA office on 10/28/2010. I watched the keynote presentations.

Here are the key items I got out of the keynote:

• Emphasis on IE9 beta with HTML5 and CSS3 in my opinion was interesting, but since it is still in development, it’s still hype. The nice thing is that they are getting behind HTML5 in a big way which will help cross-browser development move forward. I understand the concerns about it detracting from (or eliminating) Silverlight, but I have a wait and see attitude about all that. In the meantime, I am going to go full steam ahead on both.
• There’s a new oData client library out for Windows Phone 7.  New profiling tools are coming soon. I have been trying out oData for an InfoTrail contact manager application for WP7 – so far, so good. I’ll get into more detail on that in another post.
• There will be an Azure virtual machine role available for Windows Server by year end. That should allow an easier migration path to the Cloud for many legacy applications. It will include Remote Desktop, full IIS, elevated privileges, and multiple administrators. Gee – just like a “real” server!
• Team Foundation Server is coming to Azure. This is very interesting to me because it opens up more opportunities to collaborate anywhere in the world.
• Azure Marketplace is being opened up to allow buying and selling of data.

I found a more detailed (and frankly, better) overview here.

The only problem I have with this information is that most of it was things that are coming soon, not things that are available now. But that is normally what is presented in this kind of keynote. I always get a sense of vaporware from this.