The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference is currently being held in Los Angeles (October 27th and October 30th). Five major announcements have now been disclosed: (For up to date information and essential resources refer to the Microsoft PDC Website)
PDC Day 1 Announcements: Read the official press announcement
- Microsoft Windows Azure Online Services: Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers. Visit the Official Windows Azure Website and read the article What is Azure?
PDC Day 2 Announcements: Read the official press announcement
- The company also delivered a pre-beta build of Windows 7 to PDC attendees and announced plans to release the full Windows 7 beta early next year. In terms of the final release of Windows 7 the official guidance is three years after the release of Vista. For further information visit the Windows 7 Website, Windows Team Blog, and Engineering Windows 7 Team Blog
- Microsoft demonstrated, for the first time, its new Web applications for Office, which are lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are used from within standard Web browsers. The company showed how anyone can use all of the Web, phone, and PC versions of Office to edit the same rich document, switching among them seamlessly with lossless file compatibility. This new offering will be compatible with familiar Web browsers from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Microsoft will release a private Technical Preview of Office Web applications later this year. In the meantime, customers interested in learning more about the upcoming beta availability are encouraged to sign up for Microsoft Office Live Workspace at http://www.workspace.officelive.com.
- Live Services for Seamless Client-Cloud Experiences: Microsoft demonstrated many capabilities of the Live Services platform, including how developers can build rich applications and experiences that can be extended to over 400 million users of the company’s Windows Live services such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. The company demonstrated many aspects of Live Services including Live Mesh. Live Mesh is a service for synchronizing any user’s documents, media, files and application data across multiple PCs and devices, and is available as an open beta at http://www.mesh.com for Windows and Windows Mobile.
- The Best of Web and Windows Development With Visual Studio and .NET: In terms of software development, Microsoft highlighted how it continues to help make it easy for developers to use their existing skills to build applications from the Web to the desktop, through both the recent Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 service packs, and the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 releases. Building on Monday’s announcements that Visual Studio and the .NET Framework will make it easy for developers to create applications for the new Azure Services Platform, the company revealed that Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 innovations will help developers build next-generation applications for Windows 7 and take advantage of new features in Windows 7, such as the Ribbon and support for multitouch enabled interfaces. Several other areas of improvements in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 were shown, with a focus on Win32, C++, ASP.NET, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.
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