Ok, Day 1 of Connect(); 2017 is in the bag and by now as I write this the attendees are all probably trying to elbow their way to the front of the beer line. I watched a lot of the content and saw some amazing stuff that I can't wait to get my hands on to try.
Perhaps a bit overshadowed by all the cool Visual Studio and Azure announcements, many of the Visual Studio Partner community had their own announcements. So I thought it would be nice to highlight some of them.
Of course, we had our own announcement of Visual Basic Upgrade Companion 8.0, so get your free trial asap and take a run at that old VB6 code you're sick of maintaining.
/n software can securely connect Azure IoT devices with their hardened communications components.
If you're concerned about the looming compliance date for Europe's GDPR (and if not you should be), take a look at PreEmptive's new small business GDPR Compliance Relief program, wherein they provide some discounts and free stuff to help small businesses get compliant.
Some of the cooler demos at Connect(); today were around Azure machine learning and AI: Progress has lashed up their Telerik controls, Xamarin Forms, and Azure Cognitive Services into a sample app with a walk-through showing how to use Xamarin to build awesome cross-platform apps. This one recognizes faces in your photo collection or something pretty sweet--I'm going to get it and see what it does.
If you're into cross-platform but you need specialized imaging capabilities like OCR, barcodes, PDFs, and so forth, take a look at LEADTools, who say version 20 is just around the corner.
Got Redis and bigly data? CData now has fast drivers for ADO.NET, ODBC, and JDBC for your Redis OS or Enterprise.
Redgate says they can show you how to do DevOps with your database, which sounds pretty interesting. If only I can remember where I put my SQL password I will watch their webinar.
Grape City has a new version of ActiveReports 12 Server
Infragistics has the Ultimate UI for WPF 17.2 guaranteed to be better, faster, and make all your dreams come true.
And let's not forget Aqua Security, nuu:bit, Genesys, Canarys, Click2Cloud, or Opshub, who are all very fine but are saving their new announcements for a later date.
That's all for now.