Putting lipstick on a cancelled PDC pig

Microsoft announced late on Thursday May 24 that it has cancelled the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) that was slated for this October.

Microsoft said it had decided to "reschedule" the event to some unspecified future date. The notice of the cancellation is on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Web site:

"As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed 'Katmai,' Visual Studio codenamed 'Orcas' and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies."

For the last few years, Microsoft had held a PDC every two years. The show tends to be a showcase for Windows and developer-tools futures.

Interestingly, there's no mention of Windows client in the cancellation notice. PDC 2003 and PDC 2005 were showcases for Longhorn. With Microsoft not wanting to talk publicly about anything other than Windows Vista on the client side of the house, there might have been a serious dearth of content at PDC 2007.

More food for thought on the PDC cancellation:

Former Softie Robert Scoble: Microsoft Postpones PDC

Microsoft developer Robert McLaws: Why The 'Steve Jobs Reveal' Should Be Dead