Frameworks
PDC: Shock and Awe
The PDC 2008 offered a stunning display of overwhelming force as Microsoft rolled out a veritable host of development-oriented platforms, products, tools and technologies.
Colin Powell would have made an excellent Microsoft executive. At least, that's what I came away thinking after attending the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles last month. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, Powell later earned renown for articulating what has come to be known as the Powell Doctrine.
That doctrine, in part, argues that if the nation is to engage in war, it must do so decisively, employing overwhelming military force to break the will of an enemy, shorten the conflict and ultimately reduce casualties. The approach was used to great effect by allied forces in the 1991 Gulf War.
The PDC 2008 offered a stunning display of overwhelming force as Microsoft rolled out a veritable host of development-oriented platforms, products, tools and technologies. From the ambitious Windows Azure cloud launch that looks poised to reinvent the company, to Windows 7, .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft displayed a level of activity at PDC that was nothing short of overwhelming.
Count busy developers among the overwhelmed. Attendees struggled to come to terms with Azure, which for the first time presents us with a Windows that's not for sale. Based on technologies in Windows Server, according to Microsoft Services Marketing GM Jeff Hansen, Windows Azure will live strictly in Microsoft's own data centers, serving up cloudy goodness to customers interacting with services-based versions of SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Office and other Microsoft apps. The problem is, a lot of Microsoft customers didn't understand this.
I spent the last two days just doing non-stop press interviews, and a lot of it was just recapping, 'let me walk you through all the [new stuff we announced],'" Hansen said on the third day of the conference. "I think we maybe popped too much. We held too many things and popped it all at once."
Hansen has a point.
The Visual Studio 2010 CTP is a bombshell that delivers enhanced testing facilities, parallel programming and slick visual-editing facilities enabled by Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg pitched the next version of C#, showing how it will tap the Dynamic Language Runtime to enable dynamic typing in the now-static language. And Scott Guthrie announced ASP.NET 4.0, new toolkits and controls for WPF and Silverlight 2, and a host of other new tools and initiatives.
And as expected, attendees got their first look at "Oslo," the code name for Microsoft's modeling initiative and the stuff it does for developers crafting domain-specific languages.
The Microsoft PDC 2008 confab was, in a word, decisive. From the strategic move into cloud computing, to the well-shaped preview of Windows 7, to the welcome enhancements of Visual Studio and .NET Framework, Microsoft across the board at PDC moved decisively, strategically and energetically to advance its platforms.
PDC 2008 offered a glimpse of what overwhelming force looks like. The challenge for .NET developers now, I suppose, is to not get overwhelmed.
About the Author
Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.