The ramblings of a yorkshire tyke

The week before last I attended Microsoft TechEd here in India, which was a great success.

I especially liked my boss “The COBOLATOR“, who did a great talk about his experiences with Microsoft and his views on using COBOL. This combined we another great talk by Paul/PaulA and Mark about how COBOL is everywhere and how Visual COBOL can seriously help you take advantage of existing COBOL code as well as showing how great COBOL is for new development made a great conference.

When I was not seeing my colleagues perform on stage, I was at our stand meeting people and I have to say the people at the conference were amazingly friendly and very happy to talk mere developer such as myself. It was honestly refreshing to meet such open minded people with a honest interest in using Microsoft technology to its fullest.

Well that was then and now; me and several of my colleagues are trying to get home to the UK but due to the dust cloud caused by the Icelandic volcano we are stranded here. However rather than going completely insane, we have tried to keep busy doing some work and visiting some local sites.

To that end, I have placed some of my photo’s from, these can be found [Here].

I hope you find them interesting and thank goodness for the SkyDrive in the cloud

The last couple of weeks have been very busy and it has unfortunately affected the amount of blog entries I have done but the good news I have plenty of new material..

So, what’s my excuse.. Well we have been counting down the internal builds of Visual COBOL and we are pretty much ready to ship which is a relief since we are going to launching it at the Microsoft’s Visual Studio launch parties in Las Vegas and TechEd in Bangalore April 12-14.

Personally for me I am quite excited because I will be going to Teched in Bangalore to help show off Visual COBOL.

If would like a look at some of the Visual Studio 2010 integration Micro Focus has is about to release, pop along to http://vs2010.microfocus.com/ and see for yourself. Better still, have a visit to teched

I will finish the silly little blog with a link to a demo of Visual COBOL. Just because I’m proud of it…

ref: http://www.microsoftteched.in/
and http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/products/2010/default.mspx

My boss (Mark Conway) the other day was lucky enough to demonstrate some of the wonders of next release at TechEd 2009 in the keynote with Jazon Zander’s entitled: “Visual Studio 2010: New Challenges, New Solutions”

The demo shows off some of the nice features of Visual Studio 2010 and how we looking to use it for COBOL. I think it looks great!

Tip: Skip to about 34 mins into it for Mark

Click here for TechEd Online – for the actual video

And finally here is Jazon Zander’s Blog.