PDC2008 website & registration is now live
The PDC2008 website went live and registration opened just under an hour ago.
Venue: Los Angeles Convention Center
Dates: 27.10.2008 - 30.10.2008
The PDC is targeted toward software developers and strategic architects focused on the future of the Microsoft platform.
There's a preliminary list of sessions here which includes details of some of the Windows 7 sessions :-
Windows 7: Graphics Advances
Windows 7 enables you to advance the graphics capabilities of your applications while carrying forward existing investments in your Win32 codebase, including GDI and GDI+. New enhancements to DirectX let Win32 applications harness the latest innovations in GPUs and LCD displays, including support for scalable, high-performance, 2D and 3D graphics, text, and images. Also learn how to leverage the GPU's parallelism for general-purpose computation such as image processing.
Windows 7: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Battery Life
A single application can reduce mobile battery life by up to 30%. Windows 7 provides advances for building energy-efficient applications. In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services.
Windows 7: Touch Computing
In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.
Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code
Windows 7 introduces a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code. This session will discuss the programming model, interoperability aspects with other implementations of WS-* protocols and demonstrate various services and applications built using this API.
Steven Sinofsky talked about Windows 7 yesterday.
and some cool cloud computing sessions:-
A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer
This session will go beyond the "Hello World" development experience and explore common tasks for serious service developers. These tasks include logging, debugging, deployment, management and maintenance of individual services.
Architecting Services for the Cloud
From design to implementation, building a scalable, available web service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session will discuss the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how Microsoft's cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service.
Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service
In this session, we'll take a tour of the capabilities of Microsoft's cloud platform by building and running a simple service using the platform SDK. The sample service will highlight some of the features of the platform including computation, service management, storage, and integrated developer experience. This is a demo-heavy session.
Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications
The Live Mesh cloud services and client platform provide powerful FeedSync-based data synchronization capabilities, device P2P and cloud-relay communications, pub-sub infrastructure, and an extensibility model for applications. In this session, we'll describe how you can take advantage of the Mesh developer platform, protocols, and APIs to mesh-enable your existing and future web services and client applications--allowing you to target unique new scenarios and reach new users.
Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive
You've heard about Microsoft's new software+services platform Live Mesh, combining the world of the web and the world of digital devices. Come take a look under the hood and learn about the underlying service architecture behind this mass-scale cloud service and client platform. We'll look at services such as FeedSync-based synchronization, accounts and security services, P2P communications, pub-sub infrastructure, and the Mesh Operating Environment (MOE).
Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs
Learn how you can take advantage of the full power of the next generation Live developer platform in your web or client application. We'll take a look at new and future services, protocols, APIs, and tools which enable your applications to access, store, and synchronize user data with Live services, stream media, obtain audience analytics data, work with presence, authentication, and more.
Logical Queuing: Developing Occasionally Connected Clients
With Sync Services for ADO.NET, Sync Framework, etc., what technology should you use to develop applications that enable end-user productivity regardless of network connectivity? The reality is no one technology solves the problem. We will demonstrate how you can build offline-capable rich client applications by combining technologies like ADO.NET and SQL Server Compact Edition with the Microsoft Sync Framework. Next we take an architectural approach for "using the right tool for the right job" and show how many of these technologies actually work best when brought together in a cohesive solution that highlights the values each technology has to offer.
Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud
Modern services need available, scalable, data in many forms, including both structured and unstructured data. These are some of the storage abstractions provided in Microsoft's cloud platform. This session presents the unified data model and APIs for manipulating and querying data.
Under the Hood: Architecture of Storage in the Cloud
Get a deeper understanding of the storage architecture and understand how the storage platform can be used to the best of its capabilities. From low-level streams all the way to partitioned tables, cloud storage must be designed and optimized for the scaling demands of the cloud. This session will examine the underlying architecture of each layer of the storage service as well as the data modeling and programming interfaces exposed.
Under the Hood: Building SQL Server Data Services
Learn how we built SQL Server Data Services to address hard distributed systems and operations challenges. We will describe how we solved problems like failure detection, leader election, and automatic failover using a new innovation called Distributed Data Fabric. We will go deep and elaborate on the changes we made to the core SQL Server RDBMS to ship this massively scalable data service. We will also describe the operational systems we use to provision, monitor, and manage SSDS without interrupting the service. Finally, you will learn how we manage and run this service in our datacenters.