Bill Gates delivered the keynote speech at the MS Tech ED Developer Conference  Tuesday morning before a full house at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.  He is due to step down as chairman of Microsoft on July 1 to concentrate full time on his charitable foundation. He began by offering a humorous look at what might occur on his last day. This skit included cameo appearances by celebrities such as Bono, George Clooney, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain.  Gates mentioned that the transition period has been mapped out for two years and that this was his last public appearance as Chairman of Microsoft.

Gates looked at what he considered to be important”Technology Megatrends’ over the next 10 years. He mentioned that the most significant will be how people interact with computers including voice recognition and touch screens. He spoke about how in the future desks will have computers in them.

He also took a logical look at multi-tiered applications and broke them down into presentation, business, data access, and service layers. He shared the stage with some of his vice presidents who presented demos on each of these tiers with current functionality.  This included Internet Explorer 8.0, WPF and SilverLight in the presentation layer; SQL Server 2008 and improved tooling in Visual Studio Team System in the data layer, and looks at architectural validation tools in the business layer. He also was pleased with the direction of Windows Communication Framework and mentioned that he thought that services in the cloud were going to be a huge future trend. Some services will be free, some paid for by advertisements, and some would be paid or subscription based services.

He reminisced about his early days of computing on an Altair running Basic and that getting 16K of memory was a milestone, because it allowed early programmers to have access to lower case. Prior to that, all text was in upper case. He contrasted this with the richness of Visual Studio’s IDE and noted how far software development tools have come.

He closed his appearance by taking questions from the audience. He certainly is a man of great vision and his place as a thought leader will be missed.