Ready for PDC
I'm just about to head off for the Las Angeles Convention Center to attend the opening keynote of this year's Professional Developers Conference (PDC). While PDC09 will not match the scope and scale of PDC08, it's still going to be a major event in the .NET developer community.
We expect to hear a whole lot about Microsoft Azure and cloud computing development -- there are plenty of sessions dedicated to migrating to cloud environments, mixing on-premise and cloud operations and many similar topics. Oslo will also be re-visited, in a less ambitious form than it took during PDC08.
In a similar vein, I expect a lot of activity around .NET 4 as it continues to round into shipping shape. As with Azure, there are plenty of sessions addressing .NET 4, with looks at various foundation elements (WPF, WCF, WF), a ton of identity-related activities, as well as guidance on what's coming in C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET. VSM Executive Editor Kathleen Richards tells me we could see news around the Silverlight rich Internet application (RIA) platform.
A lot of these technologies are already well exposed to the development community. Heck, Windows Azure made its grand debut at last year's PDC, and Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg was giving everyone the lowdown on C# 4.0 at this same venue a year ago. What we can expect to see, though, is a lot of concrete detail. Expect refined messaging, scoped down technology visions, and overall a more tactical and concrete PDC experience from Microsoft.
While PDC09 may not end up being the ultimate big-picture dev conference, it could yield more tactile value to .NET developers than many expect. Of course, it's not out of the question that Redmond decides to pull a surprise or three out of its hat.
We'll know soon enough.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/17/2009