If one thing was clear at TechEd this year, it is that Microsoft’s partners are no longer in the throes of recession. The floor was bustling with activity, and software makers were eager to show off their latest wares.

ActiveBatch added functionality to its automated job-scheduling development software to eliminate the need for scripting.

AVIcode released an update to its APM solution that addresses Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and Silverlight. It provides component discovery, dependency discovery, service model discovery and behavior discovery, said product manager Alex Zakonov. “We monitor the actual end-user experience in the browser, so that we see the exact behaviors of an applications and their payloads,” he added.

ComponentOne unveiled a new online store that was built using its ASP.NET components and .NET 4.0 technologies.

DevExpress demonstrated a new inline color picker that is built into its CodeRush productivity add-on for Visual Studio. Developers click on the color reference, and a swatch dialog loads. CodeRush also added the ability to convert foreach loops in C# and Visual Basic to parallel foreach method calls using the .NET 4.0 parallel library.

InCycle, a consultancy, released a product called InRelease, which automates releasing applications from test environments in Visual Studio, said president Claude Remillard. “It simplifies scripts, removes config files and provides traceability,” he added.

The Mono team was busy showing off a beta of Mono Tools for Visual Studio 2010, but was “primarily doing Q&A sessions about what Apple is thinking” with respect to its MonoTouch tool, said product manager Joseph Hill.

/n Software developed an ADO.NET adapter that binds data to PowerShell.

OpenSpan announced the availability of a free download of its OpenSpan development environment. The standalone product previously cost US$10,000. Customers now pay for a yearly subscription per seat. A Visual Studio plug-in enables developers to mix OpenSpan integration components with natively built .NET applications, said director of marketing communications Pete Johnson.

PreEmptive Solutions announced universal support for Silverlight in its runtime intelligence and code obfuscation products. ”Developers can inject what they are going to write, but also what they have written,” said chief marketing officer Sebastian Holst. That data will help developers migrate their applications to Windows Azure, he said.

Red Gate Software introduced a source-control database for SQL Server. SQL Source Control integrates with Microsoft’s Management Studio tools, allowing developers to use Subversion or Team Foundation Server to manage changes, said product manager Stephanie Herr.

Stone Bond Technologies was to begin to distribute an ADO.NET driver in late June. Developers can go into WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) 3.0, or any other tool that can do ADO.NET connections, and create mashed-up data objects that can be read or updated, said technical director Mike Guillory. ”With our product, you can create data definitions one time, and that same definition works for all [SharePoint] systems.”

Sybase demonstrated its recently released PowerBuilder 12 RAD development tool. “PowerBuilder 12 provides a seamless path from Win32 to .NET,” said Lisa Hopkins, director of product marketing.

A beta of Telerik‘s JustCode productivity tool for Visual Studio includes a unit test runner. It also integrates with JustMock, the company’s UI-mocking tool. “Mocking is generally something that is confusing or difficult to do,” said chief evangelist Todd Anglin. It also released a new data services wizard that helps developers create data-driven Silverlight applications. The wizard generates services that pull data for the user, Anglin explained.