Alexander’s Blog

Microsoft has several products that are generating good revenue for their business. Mary Jo Foley recently published this article that has more details. Most of the heavy hitters are big names but SharePoint definitely stands out.

There are over dozens products in this select group that generate over a $1 billion a year in sales for Microsoft, including the following products listed in alphabetical order.

1.  Azure
2.  Developer Tools
3.  Dynamics (ERP & CRM)
4.  Office
5.  Online display and search advertising.
6.  SharePoint (crossed the $2 billion mark in 2012)
7.  SQL Server
8.  System Center
9.  Unified Communications
10. Windows
11. Xbox

SharePoint is supposedly the only product that have crossed the $2 billion mark. If I am not mistaken, SharePoint was also the first product to cross the $1 billion in sales. You can bet all the tea in China that Office365 will be added to this list shortly.

For more information on this topic, check out Mary Jo Foley’s article. She also has some other interesting stuff in her article.

Visual Studio has been a developer tool for years. Microsoft recently announced that it is going to offer a version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio LightSwitch (formerly code named Kitty Hawk) that will be available as part of Visual Studio Professional, Premium, and Ultimate. LightSwitch will especially be useful for non-developers or business users that don’t know how to write code but want to create fully functional line-of-business (LOB) applications for the cloud and desktop. To me LightSwitch seems to be Visual Studio for dummies, à la FrontPage, which was a Web site editor for the beginners and non-professionals. Let’s just hope that the apps we create in LightSwitch are not as messy as the Web sites created in FrontPage.

WebMatrix vs. LightSwitch

If you recall, Microsoft announced WebMatrix Web development suite not too long ago which is meant for developers, students, and just about everyone who wants to build applications. WebMatrix (currently in beta) is everything you need to build Web sites using Windows. It includes IIS Developer Express (a development Web server), ASP.NET (a Web framework), and SQL Server Compact (an embedded database). Although both WebMatrix and LightSwitch are meant to build applications, the main difference is HTML UI (WebMatrix) vs. Silverlight UI (LightSwitch).

Availability

LightSwitch is supposed to help you quickly create professional-quality business applications, regardless of your development skills. The beta version of LightSwitch will be available on August 23, 2010 to MSDN Subscribers. Later on it will be available to the general public. A final version is expected to be released sometime next year.

If you are not a developer, check out this page on Microsoft’s Web site.

If you are a developer, check out this page on MSDN.

If you are a developer you might be interested in a free Visual Studio 2008 clinic from Microsoft. This clinic will provide a start point for Enterprise Developers and Software Architects that are looking to Windows Workflow Foundation as a solution for enabling business processes within their solutions. Within the clinic you will learn about the functionality provided by the workflow engine, the overall architecture, and how to build workflow enabled applications.

Clinic 6262: Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation using .Net Framework 3.5 & Visual Studio 2008