Microsoft has made available Visual Studio 2010 beta which includes WPF 4 beta support for multi-touch development. Anything in this Grid should (at design time, now show Customer properties in the binding assistant. A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed to Betanews that today, May 18, will be the release date for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, for MSDN subscribers.

The new IDE will also give developers their first chance to build .NET services in the cloud, a huge new addition to that platform. This will change in coming VS 2010 release, but waiting the latter, Blend is your only friend (it will still be a best friend to design SL and WPF, even when VS 2010 will be released, so learn today how to use it.

Cisco’s strategy is driven by virtualization. Chambers emphasized that Cisco sees an “inflection point” for virtualization that will transform the data center and requires a new architecture to allow companies to take full advantage of the mobility of virtual machines.

Cisco has defined a new proprietary frame protocol; VNTag, for UCS’s Network Interface Virtualization model such that an attached physical switch, according to Cisco, cannot be connected to just any IEEE 802.1D compliant Ethernet switch.

Besides the most well known partners – HP, Dell and IBM people seem to have missed that Linux is part of Cisco’s plan. Mike Evans, Red Hat’s VP of Corporate Development said that Red Hat and Cisco have been working on bringing RHEL 5 to the UCS (Unified Computing System) for over nine-months.

One of the major competitors for next-gen data centers is Brocade, which recently acquired Foundry Networks for the high-speed Ethernet fabric and foundation of its plans. Nikos Theodosopoulos, UBS analyst says that the battle for the next-gen data centers will be competitive, and we view it as a key driver for tech.