Next week: All PDC, all the time
How many times in the past year have I asked about a product, a service or a strategy to be told by Microsoft officials: "Just wait till the PDC. We'll explain all"?
Finally, that promised "tell-all" date is here. Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) kicks off next week.
As I've been posting over the past few months, the PDC is where Microsoft is expected to offer sneak peeks and updates on a variety of its platform technologies. (Check out my aggregated pre-PDC coverage to date.)
Attendees will get a demo of Windows 7 by Windows engineering chief Steven Sinofsky, as well as pre-beta M3 bits to take home. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is on tap to outline Microsoft's Live Framework, the Live Mesh development platform. Windows Server head Bob Muglia is expected to unveil Microsoft's cloud development platform and explain how Microsoft plans to try to one-up Amazon and Google in this space -- via a combination of its Windows Cloud OS, virtualization and a variety of cloud-optimized services. There are sessions on Microsoft's Oslo modeling strategy and platform, Silverlight 2 for mobile, parallel/concurrent computing and more.
To get a jump on things, you can check out Microbite, a new podcast series I'm doing with The Register's Gavin Clarke. Episode 1 of Microbite, our PDC Preview, is available for your listening pleasure.
Meanwhile, starting on Monday, I'll be part of a live-blogging crew with a number of other Microsoft watchers, including my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott, LiveSide's Kip Kniskern, Within Windows' Rafael Rivera, Windows Supersite's Paul Thurrott, Neowin's Tom Warren and Istartedsomething's Long Zheng. We'll be doing a combined live group blog of all of the PDC keynotes. Come back to my site on Monday October 27 at 8:30 a.m. PT to check out the live blog of Microsoft's cloud launch – a keynote by Softies Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson.
