PDC: Leaving Los Angeles
As the father of three young children, I can't help but feel a bit of a Christmas
afternoon vibe in the air as the 2008 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
closes. The packages have been opened. The gifts have been strewn about the
house. Long months of anticipation have given way, inevitably, to a bittersweet
mix of contentment and exhaustion.
In short, it's been a very good several days in L.A., both for developers who've
learned so much about the future direction of Microsoft-based development, and
for Microsoft itself, which I feel did a very good job of articulating its most
important strategy since the launch of .NET Framework in 2000. Despite some
confusion among attendees around the Windows
Azure cloud OS launch, it's apparent to me that Microsoft decisively moved
the ball forward on several fronts this PDC.
PDC 2008 also marked a critical changing of the guard. This is, I believe,
the first PDC to not feature Bill Gates as a keynote speaker. Mind you, we're
talking about PDCs stretching clear back to 1992 and the initial pitch of "Chicago,"
later known as Windows 95. The fact that things have gone so well is a real
testament to the new vanguard in Redmond (I'm looking at you, Ray Ozzie, Steven
Sinofsky and Scott Guthrie).
More important, the high-level messaging coming out of this conference was
remarkably well-orchestrated and harmonized. Make no mistake, the Azure effort
could fall flat on its face two years from now, but the approach Microsoft is
taking looks sound: Leverage heavily against .NET, align development on the
familiar Visual Studio IDE and provide plenty of choice along the continuum
of pure, premises-based server deployments to full-on, Azure-hosted services
in the cloud.
Microsoft has a ton of problems to solve in all this, not the least of which
is how to mesh these new Microsoft-owned services with the existing channel
of value-added resellers and service providers who've moved into managed services
and hosting. I'll leave it to my astute colleague Scott Bekker, editor in chief
of Redmond Channel Partner, to ponder those questions.
But even without the prospect of a channel fight, Microsoft has to deliver
a lot of very robust technologies even as it manages server product families
that have suddenly spawned services operations (SQL Server now
adds SQL Services, for example). As Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Campbell
told us, it's a big job to staff up the services skills to drive the Azure-side
development, and there's a lot of additional coordination that needs to be carried
forward to keep services and server versions of SQL, Exchange, Office and the
like in sync.
Do I think Microsoft can pull it off? Yeah, I do. But if Microsoft stays true
to form, it won't happen as quickly and as smoothly as you might hope or think.
Consider the sudden emergence of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) at this
year's PDC. This is a technology that was released to a good deal of internal
excitement within Microsoft, but got squelched by a combination of missing tools,
wildfire AJAX Web development and the poor uptake of Windows Vista. Microsoft
all but set WPF aside, at least publicly, while it stumped heavily for WPF's
kissing cousin: the Silverlight rich Internet application platform and runtime
that uses the same Extensible Markup Language (XAML) technology and tooling
as WPF.
And now, at PDC 2008, it turns out that WPF is at work all over the place --
from Windows 7 to the compelling Surface touch UI, and even to the design surface
in the Visual
Studio 2010 CTP and new Oslo Quadrant visual modeling tool. Component makers
like Infragistics and DevExpress say they saw a ton of interest among developers
anxious to get started with WPF. As the old saw goes: It took three years, but
WPF may finally be an overnight success.
Which is fitting. Because at the end of the day, PDC is about the long view.
And it has almost always been Microsoft's dogged willingness to invest and invest
and invest into its new products and tooling that have ultimately brought success
to the same. So yes, we might still be scoffing a bit at Azure at PDC 2010 or
whenever the next confab occurs -- but that doesn't mean we should be counting
it out.
We'll be covering the PDC extensively in our upcoming issues and want to include
your insight! Send us your thoughts on the PDC 2008 event and how it was useful
(or not-so-useful) to you. E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 10/31/2008