This year I did not have the opportunity to join the Microsoft PDC event personally but I did manage to follow most part of the keynotes. Keynotes were streamed live both on November 17th and November 18th. If you would like to watch them on-demand they are being made available on the www.microsoftpdc.com site soon.
The PDC is historically quite important for announcements, this year was no different. Here’s an overview of what was announced (note: personal list, no guarantees it’s an exhaustive list).
Speakers for the first keynote were Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and Bob Muglia, President Server & Tools.
Windows Azure release schedule was announced, the services are free to evaluate through January 2010. We will begin charging customers on February 1st, 2010.
Pinpoint can be viewed as a marketplace to find partners with whom to work for your projects, giving you access to specialized service providers and support.
Dallas also works together with Pinpoint, which can be seen as your marketplace for data providers.
Loic LeMeur, founder of Seesmic went on stage to present the new Seesmic for Windows. This version is built in WPF and can be downloaded from the seesmic.com site. At the same time he also showed a Silverlight version of the application (note: currently the Silverlight version is not available yet).
The next version of ASP.NET MVC is available in beta. Check out Phil Haack’s post on this. This beta release contains a go-live license.
Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric include the capabilities from projects “Dublin” and “Velocity,” as well as the Service Bus and Access Control services that were formerly under the “.NET Services” brand (today, these services are now called Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure platform AppFabric Access Control services).
For Web applications, AppFabric provides caching capabilities to provide high-speed access, scale, and high availability to application data. This feature was previously codenamed "Velocity".
For composite applications, AppFabric makes it easier to build and manage services built using Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. This feature was previously codenamed "Dublin."
Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and Kurt DelBene were the top speakers announced for this keynote.
The stuff put into Silverlight 4 is incredible, that’s what you’ll hear from anyone that watched the day 2 keynote. New features like elevated trust and notifications for out-of-browser Silverlight applications, but also webcam and microphone support, print support, and much much more.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available now, Tim Heuer has great post with all the links and starter demos and videos for you – http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx.
One last thing: if you haven’t watched the keynote, take the time to watch it soon because I promise, it’s worth it. As Silverlight is one of my focus points I can recommend you to watch the Silverlight 4 part at the very least.