Microsoft developer technologies to take center stage at PDC

InfoWorld - With a full schedule on tap, the 2009 Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) next week will tout efforts ranging from the company's Windows Azure cloud platform to plans for programming languages

Session descriptions for the Los Angeles event reveal topics such as "Architecting and Developing for Windows Azure," "Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic" and "Software + Services Identity Roadmap Update."

[ Check out InfoWorld's coverage of Microsoft's SharePoint 2009 conference. ]

Introduced at last year's PDC, Azure remains a hot topic for the company, based on this year's PDC schedule. One session, entitled "Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud," invites attendees to hear " how Microsoft views the future of cloud computing and how it is starting to deliver this vision in the Windows Azure platform."

"Learn how applications can be written to preserve much of the investment in code, programming models, and tools, yet adapt to the scale-out, distributed, and virtualized environment of the cloud," the session description reads. Migrating applications to Azure also will be covered at PDC.

In addition to hearing C# and Visual Basic plans, attendees interested in programming languages can learn about Axum, which provides a .Net language for  "safe and scalable" concurrency, the PDC Web site states.

Axum is a project from Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. "It's a language that builds on the principles of isolation, agents, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity," according to the PDC site.

A road map for the Silverlight rich Internet application platform will be detailed at PDC. Microsoft's M data and modeling language will be covered as well. "Explore the future of M, where DSL, schema, and lots of other great ideas come together as a single Web-centric data processing language," the PDC Web site states. XAML futures for .Net Framework, Silverlight, and tools will be covered in a separate session.

The Microsoft "Velocity" project, featuring distributed in-memory caching, is to be detailed at PDC. Velocity "will change how you think about scaling your Microsoft .Net-connected applications," a session description reads. Also on the roster of sessions is one entitled, "InferNet: Building Software with Intelligence." Infer.Net is a machine-learning framework for building .Net software that can adapt to a user, learn from examples or work with uncertain information.

Also at PDC, Microsoft will discuss its SQL Server Modeling technology, formerly known as the Oslo modeling platform, Microsoft's Douglas Purdy, a software architect, revealed this week in a blog. But the transformation of Oslo has not sat well with some Microsoft observers.

"Oslo seems to have gone from a potential new enterprise architect modeling platform to just a modeling tool and DSL stack for SQL Server. This ignores all those large enterprise IT departments with heterogeneous data platforms," said one person commenting in the blog.