Tuesday morning’s TechEd developers conference was about future plans: the future of Bill Gates, the future of Microsoft without Bill Gates, and future developments. Over 6,000 people signed up for the events this week, dedicated to developers.

And Bill Gates’ keynote couldn’t have started off without mentioning that this was in fact his last public speech as a full-time chairman at Microsoft, before July 1, when his work at the foundation will become his primary activity.

Not only that, but as Gates said, career changing is a first for him. Gates has been in the software business since he was 17-years-old, and his entire career evolved around the evolution of software as we see it today.

Leaving that aside (as Gates will keep a part-time job in the company), Microsoft’s plans for the near future include an Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, which should become available this August in 20 languages worldwide.

As promised last year, Microsoft launched the first Internet Explorer 8 beta version this year, as the browser meant to replace IE 7 and to continue the battle for supremacy with Firefox 3.0, currently also in a beta phase.

The new beta 2 browser offers significantly improved standards support and developer platform investments with enhanced user experience, Microsoft explained, and hopefully it will crash a lot less too, we might add.

In addition to that, Silverlight 2 beta 2, the latest version of Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device plug-in, will become available starting this week. The company also unveiled that Silverlight 2 beta 2 will be used to power the online experience NBC Universal is preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Microsoft added plans of new partnerships, with IBM, to integrate IBM DB2 database access with the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition; and with Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Ontela Inc., and SmugMug Inc. for Microsoft Sync Framework, which will be released in Q3 of 2008.