My co-workers and I attended the Microsoft launch event in New York yesterday for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. The theme of the event was “HEROES happen {here},” where the heroes are the IT workers who make the technology work.

Overall, the event was pretty good, there were a few technical glitches during the keynote but nothing major. All of their demos were running in Hyper-V.

I attended the infrastructure session which covers Windows Server 2008 and I have to say that I’m now very excited to really play around with the new features in this new version of Windows after attending this presentation. I really didn’t know much about it before the event.

Here are some of the new features in Windows Server 2008:

1. Server Core installation option (Finally!!! This is a minimal installation of Windows Server 2008, no GUI. This is a very nice option if you want a server to perform a dedicated task, like a print server for example. It requires less disk space, better performance, better security, and less things to manage and patch)
2. Read-Only Domain Controllers (RODC)
3. Terminal Services enhancements (TS RemoteApp, TS Gateway, TS Web Access, TS Session Broker, TS Easy Print)
4. Group Policy improvements (Ability to search, filter, and add comments)
5. Network Access Protection

They also gave away some free software:

• full version of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 32-bit
• full version Visual Studio 2008 Standard
• 1 year evaluation of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 32-bit and 64-bit
• community technology preview of SQL Server 2008 Developer 32-bit and 64-bit

It looks like I’m gonna be pretty busy this weekend.