The Microsoft PDC 2009 event had some huge announcements and not only concerning Microsoft products.  For those of you that may not know what the Microsoft PDC conference is all about, it is a developer event focused on the technical strategy of the Microsoft developer platform.  Literally people from all over the world come to attend this huge developer event and hear the latest on the Silverlight, Visual Studio, Azure, Windows 7 the list goes on.  This could be considered the Mecca of sorts for all Microsoft developers.  Now, to get into some of the big points that PDC09 had to offer.

Windows Azure Platform was a big focus of the conference. Since it was first announced about a year ago they have added tons of features.  One of which was the support for open-source frameworks.  You can checkout all those features here.  One thing to note is that Azure currently only runs in Microsoft data centers.  Will they allow their partners or some of their larger customers to build their own private clouds in the future?  Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Microsoft still plans on going after the browser market with it new iteration of Internet Explorer IE9.  The new IE9 is just about 1 month old now, literally, they just started working on it and are no were near a release for us to play with any time soon.  Two of the main upgrades they spoke about was the HTML5 set of standards and the speed.  With the huge boost of speed that Chrome and the recent release of the latest Firefox build it is a must for them to even compete in the market.  One big issue that was not talked about was security.  The mass market are the ones who typically tend to use IE and they are the ones who typically get attacked.  I sure hope they make that a big priority with IE9.

Silverlight 4 is now in beta and available for you to download.  Mr. Silverlight himself Tim Heuer put together an amazing list of video resources from the conference:

• CL01 – Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview (Karen Corby)
• CL02 – Silverlight 3 Advanced Performance and Profiling (Seema Ramchandani)
• CL06 – Networking and Web Services (Yavor Georgiev)
• CL07 – Mastering WCF RIA Services (Dinesh Kulkarni)
• CL19 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4 (David Poll)
• CL20 – Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Silverlight 4 (Joe Stegman)
• CL21 – Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight and RIA Services (Brad Abrams)
• CL22 – Advanced Topics for Building Large-scale Applications with Silverlight (John Papa)
• CL24 – XAML Futures in Microsoft .NET Framework (Rob Relyea)
• CL32 – Developing Testable Silverlight Applications (Keith Jones)
• CL08 – Custom Behaviors for Advanced Microsoft Silverlight UI Effects (Peter Blois)
• CL36 – Deep Dive on Bing maps Silverlight Control (Keith Kinnan)
• PR03 – Integrate Microsoft Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 (Paul Stubbs)
• FT24 – Building Extensible RIAs with Managed Extensibility Framework (Glenn Block)

Tim has more great Silverlight tips and references that you can checkout here.

Like I told you earlier in the post not all big news came from Microsoft.  Loic Le Meur founder of Seesmic announced their Windows specific desktop application during the keynote at PDC.  It was completely rebuild from the ground up and I must say it is quite a great application.  For now I will let Loic show you the application but we will have a full review and interview with Loic Le Meur that we conducted during The Underground at PDC09.

Overall the Conference had great new products/services/features that came out of it.  If you are a Microsoft fanatic this would be one conference not to miss.  Definitely checkout the PDC website for more information or videos you may have missed if you were not able to attend.