Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. Gates adopted the "Seamless Computing" theme for his three-pronged, developer-oriented address, which emphasized VS.NET's integrated toolset for an upgraded Windows Mobile 2003 release and Microsoft's newly announced Speech Server 2004 (see Resources). Gates' opening remarks also focused on device proliferation, code quality and security, and standards-based Web services for connectivity.

The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as "Whidbey," scheduled for release in the first half of 2005. A simple insurance claim app demonstrated the CTP's upgraded DataConnector (DataContainer in the first TP) tool that can enable business objects, in addition to conventional DataSets, as data sources. The CTP automatically builds an XML schema for the business object; the DataContainer adds a GridView or data-bound textboxes for a detailed view with a single click. An edit-and-continue example drew the obligatory—but muted—applause. Other VB.NET code productivity enhancements include Generics, the ability to create a data connection with a single line of code, the VB.NET-only My object whose members provide access to local computer resources and properties of the current user's Windows account, and "code snippets" for performing common tasks.