So, I’m Hans Verbeeck, work for the EMEA Headquarters that’s the Europe, Middle East and Africa Headquarters and more specifically in the DPE Group, Developer Platform Evangelist Group. I’m a Developer Evangelist myself for the Region and I lead a team of our internal developer evangelists also in EMEA HQ. There are 3 of us, and I’m leading that team. So what do I work on myself? Mostly, there are many things, maybe I can give you some highlights.

One of the things I do is, I manage the content for TechEd. I’m the overall content owner for TechEd and I’ve just composed a team of Track Owners. I actually had a meeting yesterday to decide on which tracks are we going to have, how much session are we going to have on which topics, how deep do we want to go at an event like TechEd? It’s a great task to develop an event like TechEd. We know that content is the thing that matters most, at least that’s what we think.

So … if you now know that the event will be in November, it’s been moved to November, and we start now ... it’s not like a full time job ... but it will take I think for myself, in my role it will take probably take about 2 months out of my life.

Yes (laughs) that is a big chunk. It’s an enormous amount of emails that you need to deal with in the end. It’s a lot of spreadsheets and deadlines, but it’s fun and it’s really rewarding and it’s the second time in a row that I do it. I did it for the last TechEd. We really had some great feedback from the attendees, that they liked the event, that they liked the content, and we are hopeful obviously to achieve something similar. So that’s one aspect.

In this fiscal year, I focus myself, besides leading the other DEs, I focus myself on Office 12, on Office 12 evangelism. So I’ve been doing some training on it, I’ve been speaking quite a bit on Office 12, a product that I’m very very excited about.

Well, mainly the whole, but my real passion is about the new UI and about the real change in how you are going to work with that product. If you look at the Ribbon which replaces the menus and the toolbars, that is just awesome. At that level I’m really, really passionate about it, and we have products in the pipeline that are going to be released soon, and those products, Vista, Office, both really offer a significantly different user experience than before. It’s the biggest jump that we’ve seen basically from version to version. Windows 95 obviously was one of those, where we took a big leap forward, but now Vista is going to be the same and with Office is going to be the same again. People will see that this is the next version and they will see that they are more productive.

You see, in evangelism we care about people adopting our technology. We want people to be working with it and with these new products I feel we won’t have to convince them why they should go to these products. We just need to show them and they will want to go to those products. Because between some of the previous versions, people are asking themselves, “Why, what’s in it for me? Why would I want to move to that?”

Well, obviously it’s still later this year, this calender year, I don’t have a date, but I still feel very comfortable about where that team is, and I still get signals every now and again from the product team that they are actually on schedule.

Well, one thing I particularly like a lot is the new search functionality in Outlook, I spend a lot of my time in Outlook like so many people. Just finding those emails is so much easier. You know with windows desktop search you already can get that but it is outside of Outlook itself, but now it is actually also inside of your Outlook, as you type it filters the list of emails that you see and it’s so powerful. That one I’m really fond of. But there are many more. And most of them have to do with the new Ribbon. It’s now easy to find functionality that sometimes was already there before, just now I am able to find it. It makes already a big difference, as I’m one of those fortunate people, who already have it on my machine, so I'm working with it from day-to-day, it just feels right.

Actually for Access, Access has got the new UI. Access will also actually have a new engine, a new data engine!

It’s fully compatible with Jet, so that people won’t necessarily notice the difference that much but it is actually a new data engine. But still the focus of Access is it is the database that can easily connect to data sources. That’s to other data sources as well, and then provide an experience on top of that, tools to build forms and things. That’s still the design goal for Access. Access is also obviously the database that we want people to use when they don’t need that full relational database management system.

I get these questions like often like “When do you choose Access and when do you choose SQL Express?” …

… It’s a very good question particularly now. I feel that SQL Express is chosen when let’s say a development team decides to build a solution and they need to bring that solution to departments. Those people, those developers, they choose SQL Express, because it allows them to scale from an Enterprise server all the way down to departmental level or all the way down to the desktop maybe.

Now Access gets chosen when people working in a department that aren’t developers when they start to build an application and that’s when Access gets chosen still. And what we have made sure of with the new version of Access that’s really cool, is that those people, although they will work with Access and they will have all those tools that are familiar to them and are actually quite easy to use to build an application with. They can now use Access to publish the data, not locally on a file where it’s basically unmanaged and unsecure very often. They can say this data has to be published to that SharePoint Server.

And that is really important! Because then you do give them the flexibility to build their own data schema and to build their forms and reports on it and stuff like that. But it is managed centrally, it is backed up, It has security built in, there is authentication and so on, and that is really powerful. That is what makes a big difference in this version. So the home users can still continue to use it for their own hobbyist typeof applications but in the enterprise Access can be used too.

Yes, and with Excel what we will have is Excel Services and this is also a great way to do things. There are multiple ways to do things, there are multiple scenarios possible there. You can actually publish your Excel sheet on a server, and then people can browse to it and they can then start working in that Excel sheet. And they can say also “Well, I want to take it offline” and they can then work in the full-fledged Excel product but it kind of goes seamlessly from the desktop to your server. You can also use Excel Services just to do calculations on the server as well, but you can also use it to serve up an Excel sheet which you can then just continue to work with in your real Excel environment. That’s really cool as well.

I’m not sure about that. You can already host some parts of Excel today, but I’m not sure how the online bits would be hosted, I’m not familiar with that particularly.

I’ve been looking more at WPF as opposed to WCF. WPF is a bit too buried deep down for me. I like to keep things visual (laughs).

WPF, yes definitely!

For WPF, I really like the fact that that you can run it in your browser or as a standalone windows application on your operating system. That for me is already very, very important, that it combines both models, although you will always need WinFx obviously to run your ‘Avalon’ applications, even if you run it from a browser.

Just the things that you can do with Avalon as an application builder are amazing, the way it combines text, documents, media. It is just amazing and we are already seeing internally some applications where you say “Yes, this is very nice graphically but it’s also making the end user more productive”, and it’s that combination that you want to have.

Yes, and something else we need to do there, and this is something else I’m passionate about moving forward.

Moving forward, I want to be working closer to the end user experience with things like Live! Coming up, Internet Services coming up, our products like ‘Avalon’ and our designer tools, our ‘Expression Suite’. I really want to be moving more in that direction. That’s going to be really important for Microsoft to say, “OK, we’ve got the platform, we’ve got the developers who can build applications, but we need to have them build great experiences for their customers!”

Yes, give me Visual Studio and I will draw you a great form with a great button on it (laughs) and I will have a grid which you need to scroll half an hour to some part of the data because I’m too lazy to implement paging (laughs). That’s what you get when you let people build the application’s front end that don’t take it from the perspective of the consumer, but take it from the persepective of the goals they’ve written and they just need to surface some data at some point.

I’m not blaming the developers, I’m mostly looking at myself in this case! But there is definitely something there that we need to change. And talking again about WPF the fact that it comes with this declarative model, that you can actually compose your UI in XAML, that is absolutely fantastic! As now you can have these tools like we will have ‘Expression Graphics’ designer, ‘Web Designer’ and mostly for WPF, ‘Interactive Designer’. We will have those tools that Designers will use. They will use a tool that seems very familiar to them. The resulting output of that tool is XAML! The developer opens Visual Studio, reads in XAML! He can even edit it a little bit, because we will have a XAML designer, ‘Cider’ is the code name for it, and then he starts hooking up code to events that are triggered by controls on that form. That model is what will make a difference. That’s fantastic!

And you see then, we have already started to talk about the whole development life-cycle with tools like VSTS and you already have people like the developer, architect and tester involved, we are expanding that, the designers need to be involved.

There is no lack of vision!

There is a good buzz about Microsoft at the moment, just like they seem to have found a direction in the last two or three years and they really seem to focussed and they’re off and running. It’s exciting times!

I see a lot of things happening on the Web 2.0 Internet Services type of things. So keeping an eye open on what’s happening with ‘Live’ brand is important now to understand where Microsoft is going.

Web 2.0 obviously means to some extent how to bring software to the consumer, to bring new user experiences to them. It will also mean in the end ‘Software as a Service’ and will mean our customers building software on the Microsoft platform and basically offering their own software as a service.

And I think there’s going to be a lot of effort going into that when we start talking to our partners and when we start building a platform that allows our partners to build software that they offer as a service. So there’s a big investment that’s going to go into that, that’s the big thing. It’s what we see in the market, it’s where we want to be. It’s where we think we can lead as well. It’s not all new stuff. Like Ray Ozzie said in his memo, we have 80% of what’s needed there. Our products SQL Server, our tools, the way we deploy software the way we Active Directory auth, all those things form a foundation.

But then you need to be able to bring this together, and say “If you build on our platform, you’re already on the next wave”. So we need to close that gap that is still between the applications people are building today and software which we would consider to be ‘Software as a Service’. But that’s where we are going, that’s the shift that’s going on within Microsoft now, and having things like DSI and so on is critical to be able to offer a platform that is suitable for ‘Software as a Service’.

Think about all those services that are out there now, SalesForce and stuff like that, all types of great applications. One thing that can really break that model is if they stop being on-line for some reason, if they cannot be managed or operated on properly. If they cannot scale out because of their application architecture, that’s when that model will break down. So that is why we feel we need to build that foundation, and that we already are building that. But then at the other end we need to provide the guidance to our customers to actually make that kind of software. So that’s really exciting! It never ends does it? (laughs)

Well thank you, and I want to wish you a lot of fun and good conversations at the first meeting of the Next Generation User Group. Maybe one day I get to see you guys at an Event like TechEd, so I’m looking forward to that. Have fun!