Frameworks
Pumped for PDC
Microsoft is poised to unveil details about Visual Studio 10, Windows 7, .NET Framework 4.0.
The recently completed Beijing Summer Olympics offer a fitting analogy for Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), poised to kick off Oct. 27 in Los Angeles.
Like the Olympic Games, the PDC is a highly anticipated event that takes place only when Microsoft has some key information to share with its developer community. The last PDC was held in September 2005, and only six PDC events have been held since the inaugural conference in July 1992.
And just as the Summer Games draw thousands of athletes competing in hundreds of events, the technologies that appear at PDC span a dizzying array of disciplines. Microsoft is poised to unveil details about Visual Studio 10, Windows 7, .NET Framework 4.0, as well as anticipated projects like the "Oslo" modeling initiative and the LiveMesh cloud-based application-sharing environment.
Alas, like the Olympic Games themselves, the PDC can be profoundly flawed. Witness the post-game meltdown after PDC 2003, when the prominently hyped "pillars of Longhorn" collapsed like the U.S. men's basketball team in Athens. Or consider the fate of the much-maligned Project Hailstorm, a star of the 2001 PDC confab, which crumbled under the weight of its own grand ambitions. And then there was the planned 2007 conference, which was postponed for a year and became PDC 2008.
While few industry gatherings approach the scope, scale and technical value of the PDC, developers would be ill-served to ignore more frequent dev-centric confabs like VSLive! and TechMentor, which are produced by the publishers of Redmond Developer News, and of course Microsoft's TecháEd. These shows offer vital forums for skills-building, professional networking and access to cutting-edge products and technologies. They let dev managers work against what's in the field now, while the PDC offers a chance to ponder what will be in the field two, three or four years in the future.
We expect a lot of important developer news to come out of the PDC and we'll be working to bring it to you as it breaks. From daily newsletters and blog reports to breaking online coverage and thoughtful post-convention wrap-ups in print, the goal is to get you the information you need to respond to Microsoft's leading-edge planning.
We're busy planning our PDC coverage right now, and we invite your input. Do you have questions you'd like us to pose to Microsoft executives? Are there specific technologies you're anxious to learn more about? E-mail me at
mdesmond@1105media.com
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About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.