Spotlight on tomorrow, at PDC 2009

LOS ANGELES, US: At the annual developer Mecca by Microsoft, PDC 2009, future is the center of all attention.

While the company is giving some peeks up its sleeve with some announcements on its future roadmap; many developers that have flocked to PDC 2009 are looking forward to Microsoft's pulling out new rabbits out of the hat and Visual Studio 10 tops that list.

The PDC 2009 is unwrapping some of the future flavors here from the Redmond's giant's kitchen.

Kick starting the view ahead, Bob Muglia, president, Servers and Tools Business, talked and showed how application evolution will take centre stage in the new cloud world.

"We are learning from you developers on how to take the existing applications forward. We have begun to evolve the applications and take advantage of clouds."

He dwelt upon some next generation attributes that will become significant in this context and relevant to apps. Elasticity, scalability, unfailing availability, multi tenancy, federated environments, model-driven bases, staged production, self-service etc. are some of them.

Don Box then followed with a demo on changes to Windows Azure and SQL Azure platform.

Connecting apps in one's own environment with new ones in public cloud environments was the main highlight, apart from talk on platform convergence.

"Next year we will develop Project Sydney that will be all about connections between existing services inside data centers with services in Windows Azure." said Bob who also added how in 2010 Virtual Machine's role will improve.

"We will allow you to create your own image, and helping easily move existing applications to cloud. We will deliver this next year. In 2010, one of the things coming is the ability to refine databases in a model way."

He also promised that there would be a lot more to explore in .Net4 and Visual Studio 10, while Windows Server Application Fabric and ASP.NET MVC are in Beta.

Later on, Microsoft showed in detail the new sandboxed features of Silverlight 4 today.

In a practical demo of these, was a Facebook application by a Microsoft expert on tools.

Punctuated constantly with applause from developer audience, this illustrated how Facebook apps, using public APIs, with the new Silverlight features can make FB environment more quick, fun and exciting.

Stuff like using MS Office alongside with individual tags, or ability to drag and drop photos instead of adding it in the standard format, ability to click and upload pics and videos in real time, padding up status updates with more than text i.e. with live photos etc., were some examples shown live here at the PDC 2009.

It also announced how SharePoint will find greater applicability in social networking environments, with sites like LinkedIn.

Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .Net Developer Platform, talked about rich cross-platform experiences that power three screens as he announced the public beta of Silverlight 4. "It provides developers with a full suite of capabilities to rapidly build quality, secure and engaging apps, on the Web or beyond the browser."

Kurt DelBene, senior VP, Office Business Productivity Group also announced release of public betas of Microsoft Office 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 etc.

These announcements are simultaneously escorted by special developer sessions like Windows Server 2008 R2 Kernel changes, MS .Net Micro Framework, Windows Azure monitoring, logging and Management APIs, ASP.NET MVC 2, Microsoft project code name 'Velocity', building administration GUI over Windows PowerShell, Windows  Presentation Foundation 4 Plumbing and Internals etc.

Microsoft has also invited developers to test new beta versions of Microsoft Silverlight 4, Microsoft Office 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.