How various occasions in the past yr have I asked about a product, a services or even a technique to get advised by Microsoft officials: “Just wait till the PDC. We;ll explain all”?Finally, that promised “tell-all” date is here. Microsoft;s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) kicks off next week.As I;ve been posting over the previous handful of months, the PDC is where Microsoft is expected to offer sneak peeks and updates on a variety of its platform technologies. (Check out my aggregated pre-PDC coverage to date.)Attendees will get a demo of
Windows 7 by Windows engineering chief Steven Sinofsky, as well as pre-beta M3 bits to take home. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is on tap to outline Microsoft;s Live Framework, the Live Mesh development platform. Windows Server head Bob Muglia is expected to unveil Microsoft;s cloud development platform and explain how Microsoft plans to try to one-up Amazon and Google in this space — via a combination of its Windows Cloud OS, virtualization and a variety of cloud-optimized services. There are sessions on Microsoft;s Oslo modeling technique and platform, Silverlight 2 for mobile, parallel/concurrent computing and more.To get a jump on things, you can check out Microbite,
Windows 7 Professional X64, a new podcast series I;m doing with The Register;s Gavin Clarke. Episode 1 of Microbite, our PDC Preview,
Office Home And Student 2010 Sale, is available for your listening pleasure.Meanwhile, starting on Monday, I;ll be part of a live-blogging crew with a number of other Microsoft watchers,
Office Professional Plus 2007, including my ZDNet colleague Ed Bott, LiveSide;s Kip Kniskern,
Buy Office 2010, Within Windows; Rafael Rivera, Windows Supersite;s Paul Thurrott,
Cheap windows 7 ultimate, Neowin;s Tom Warren and Istartedsomething;s Long Zheng. We;ll be doing a combined live group blog of all of the PDC keynotes. Come back to my site on Monday October 27 at 8:30 a.m. PT to check out the live blog of Microsoft;s cloud launch – a keynote by Softies Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson.