Visual Studio 2010 recently released a new beta of Visual Studio 2010, which includes a variety of improvements for a broad spectrum of developer needs. For PDC09, Chris

Tullier and Todd Girvin will present a day-long workshop which specifically focuses on the use of Visual Studio Team System to manage software development

tasks for teams of any size.Chris Tullier joins me on today’s episode to discuss his upcoming workshop and share some details and insights on how Visual Studio Team System can promote and support better software development practices.

You can find more information about this workshop here:

Developing Quality Software Using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010

as well as more details about Visual Studio 2010 here:

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

In our

previous episode, Vijay Rajagopalan shared with us some of the details about a session he did at MIX09 which showed how Microsoft was providing support for

building Silverlight applications using Eclipse on either Windows or even on other platforms as well.

In today’s episode Vijay shares with us the details regarding some new interoperability support which will similarly allow PHP developers to use the Eclipse IDE to develop for and deploy to Windows Azure, and provide Java developers with a new Windows Azure

SDK, making their life much easier when they use Windows Azure storage services in particular. He’ll also describe how Microsoft is working to make sure that Eclipse itself is a great Windows 7 application and how it will enable developers to write applications

which can take full advantage of special Windows 7 features.

And you can find more information about these interoperability tools here:

Microsoft to foster Eclipse and Microsoft platform interoperability

Eclipse Tools for Windows Azure for PHP

Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java

Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

As hard as it might be to believe, not everybody is using Visual Studio as their development platform. Then what if they want to develop a Silverlight application? Is notepad their only option?Fortunately not. Vijay Rajagopalan did a session at MIX09 earlier this year which shows how we've been working hard to provide interoperability support for Eclipse users that not only allows them to use Eclipse as their development environment, but also allows

them to integrate their Silverlight applications into PHP, Ruby, or Java.And if you want more details, you can watch Vijay's MIX09 session here:

Build Applications on the Microsoft Platform Using Exlipse, Java, Ruby, and PHP!

And for additional information and downloads, you might be interested in the following:

Eclipse Tools For Silverlight

Interoperability Bridges & Labs Center

Interoperability @ Microsoft

As part of our lead-up to PDC09, I am joined today by Omri Bahat who is going to share with us some of the aspects of SQL Server 2008 R2 which will provide a more efficient way to develop, deploy, and manage applications which rely on an integrated data

tier.The session itself will be presented at PDC09 by Sanjay Nagamangalam and S

Murali.You can find more details about this session here:

Simplifying Application Packaging and Deployment with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

For one of the day-long workshops at this years PDC, Michele Leroux Bustamante will be hosting a session where she'll walk attendees through

a variety of Microsoft technologies and help them understand the value of each and how to use them to their fullest advantage.In this episode, we have a special interview with Michele where she provides some details on what her workshop will be about. This workshop should be an excellent way to start the PDC off and help you be fully prepared for all of the seminars that will follow.You can get more details about this workshop here:

Microsoft Technology Roadmap Workshop