With the holidays quickly becoming a dim and distance memory and all we're left with is our belts being having to be fastened on the next notch up, it's time to get down to the technology.

As I am sure you all know that this year around March / April Microsoft will be running official launch events for this years 3 big new releases; Visual Studio 2008 along with .NET Framework 3.5, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 (codename Longhorn).

Belfast should be chuffed because on the 8th April Microsoft will be bringing the launch machine to Belfast. Keep an eye here at NIMTUG and we'll keep you posted with all the details as soon as we get them.

In the mean time to get you're all in the mood we're running with Microsoft Ireland a Community Launch Event on the 31st Jan 2008 at the Radisson SAS Hotel Belfast in the Gasworks site.

We're planning on started at 2pm and running it through to about 8:30pm, this we hope will mean that we can get a larger audience as you will not have to take the whole day off. The event will be targeting both IT Professional and Developers, though we will be running the content focused on IT Pros with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence from 2-5pm and then for the evening sessions will be more developer orientated. Though if you are like me then you will probably get a lot out of  all the sessions.

I'm not promising that these sessions will be deep and technical, I am sure that we will be covering these of the new products and features in more details later in the year in 'normal' NIMTUG talks, but the launch will give you all a chance to at least get a understanding on all the new features.

You can register for the event on the NIMTUG site here.

Here are a list of the top 5 features in each product as listed in the January Edition of the TechNet UK magazine.

Visual Studio 2008

1. Multi-targeting - using Visual Studio 2008 you can create applications that will target .NET versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 so no more switch between different versions of Visual Studio for support and development of older applications.
2. Language Integrated Query (LINQ) - LINQ simplifies the way that you connect and query to data sources, enabling you to use the same syntax to query any data source.
3. Office Development - New improved Visual Studio Tools for Office, providing support to create Office 2003 and Office 2007 applications and add-ins. Also improved experience in created applications which use SharePoint technology
4. Web development - Improved AJAX support, New data controls and improved WSIWG editor and CSS support within the IDE.
5. .NET 3.0 / 3.5 development. Better support in the IDE for developing application using WPF and WCF framework.

SQL Server 2008

1. Reporting - New Reporting designer as well as improved reporting visualisations.
2. Location intelligence - In built logic to ask questions such as 'Show me customers more than 50 miles from my warehouse'.
3. Unstructured Data - SQL Server is now able to store any type of instructed data above the previous file size limit of 2Gb.
4. Performance - New performance governor, allows a more granular control on how much resources a specific application uses.
5. Auditing - New inbuilt audit abilities enabled at the server or database, allows logs to be written to either a log file or application log.

Windows Server 2008

1. Read-only Domain Controllers (RODC) - Useful for branch offices, where you are wanting a local DC that branch office users can authenticate quickly against. Without having a full DC, which might be a security risk.
2. Network Access Protection (NAP) - Prevents clients that do not meet a level of security features (Firewall, Anti Virus etc) from accessing the network.
3. Terminal Services - The ability for Terminal Services to present a specific application rather than the whole desktop as well as the ability to tunnel RDP traffic over HTTP.
4. Task automation - The inclusion of PowerShell and a new scheduling engine.
5. Virtualisation - Windows Server 2008 contains Hyper-V, Hypervisor-based virtualisation with full 64-bit support for the host and guests.

Also Microsoft TechNet Ireland are bringing a "Deploying Windows Vista and Office 2007" event to Belfast on the 22nd January 2008.

For organisations considering the deployment of either Windows Vista or the 2007 Office system - or both, this interactive training session has been specially designed for Technical decision makers, IT implementers and Infrastructure architects, to show how straight-forward deploying these technologies can be.

The session will update participants on the proven business, management and technical benefits provided by both technologies, will address the issue of application compatibility with Windows Vista, and demonstrate how best to deploy in organisations of all sizes.

More details and registration information can be found on the Microsoft Event site at  http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032364100&Culture=en-IE