PDC 2009: Day 2
November 20th, 2009
Day 2 started with keynotes delivered by Steve Sinofsky, who showed off various parts of improvements of Windows 7. IE 9 is also announced, which is a gap closing version that targeting on standard conformance and Javascript execution speed.
Steve also demonstrated several Windows 7 ready devices, including Dell Adamo XPS. That part was underplayed because he announced that every full attendee of PDC would be given an Acer Aspire 1420P tablet for free and rocked the hall 🙂 IMO this is the answer from Microsoft to the sharpest question posted on PDC 08: if you guys posted all materials and recordings online for free, why shall we pay hefty bucks flying to LA to attend the conference?
Scott Guthrie demonstrated some cool stuff about Silverlight 3 and SketchFlow. Personally I love the concept of SketchFlow, it’s very realistic from the very beginning and I wish I had this tool years and years ago. Scott failed to demo IIS smooth streaming on iPhone, but the indication of posing an iPhone on stage was surprising enough. Microsoft started to take a serious look at supporting iPhone, and we could count on them to come back with real iPhone competitors very soon. Microsoft is really good at catching up from past records, and IMO the demo hints their confidence about winning competition against Apple/iPhone the near future.
Silverlight 4 was announced and the roadmap was laid out. It is the fastest-pacing project I’ve seen from Microsoft, and finally no longer a toy with serious Visual Studio supports. I’d wonder how Adobe is going to compete and revise AIR’s dissatisfactory performance.
I went to several sessions delivered by Microsoft technical fellows and they were more academic, I’d even wonder if I were back to school and in the first class of something like CS501. However, they were very beneficial to me for solving some of the issues that I had in my work and I’d like to recommend these sessions. You could find them on PDC 09’s web site:
Microsoft Perspective on the Future of Programming
The State of Parallel Programming
Petabytes for Peanuts! Making Sense out of “Ambient” Data
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