Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference is coming to Redmond, WA on October 28 + 29 this year. This is the first time in the history of the PDC that it will be held at the Microsoft Redmond campus. Steve Ballmer will keynote at the PDC this year and so you know there will be a lot of energy at the conference as Microsoft will talk to you about where the platform is going next.

As the PDC 2010 site said “Since 1991, the PDC has been the epicenter of Microsoft’s biggest platform announcements. This year will be no exception. Leading-edge developers and architects will gather in Redmond this October to hear firsthand from Microsoft’s leaders about the next generation of Cloud Services, Phone, Tools & Technologies, Internet Explorer and Gaming Platforms. The PDC isn’t just about content and sessions—it’s an opportunity for you to get hands-on access to the latest technologies, have your questions answered by the people who conceived and built the technologies and plan the features and architecture to support your business goals.”

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According to Rob Caron, Marketing Communications Manager for Developer and User Experience Runtimes & Tools at Microsoft, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 are set to officially launch on Monday, April 12. The Visual Studio development system is a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help software developers create innovative, next-generation applications.

Rob Sanfilippo, analyst, Developer Tools and Strategy, Directions on Microsoft, said the performance challenges facing the VS2010 team weren’t hard to anticipate. “I’m not too surprised about the performance issues. I think it has a lot to do with getting it to at least match the previous release,”

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was released in May and Beta 2 followed in October. At PDC, company officials announced a March 22, 2010 launch date for the IDE and framework. The newly announced April 12 launch date coincides with the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas, April 12-14. [via Visual Studio Magazine]

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Tell us who you are?
My name is Daron Yöndem. I’m a Microsoft Regional Director, currently a Silverlight MVP leading INETA Turkey. I’m the founder of Deveload Software, an ISV based in Istanbul. For the last five years we are focused on UX as a .NET house. We are building Silverlight and WPF apps including rich multitouch implementations. I have two books about ASP.NET AJAX and one about Internet Explorer 8 development.

Tell us about your MVP history, when were you first awarded?
I got awarded on 2008 as an ASP.NET MVP and had the chance to be one of the first five Silverlight MVPs in the world. It was a great luck to have the new competency declared at the same moment as my renewal period
I’m an MVP who likes capturing screencast, writing articles on local User Groups and physical interaction which is (for a computer geek) seminars and conferences about technical beauties. I feel very lucky leading INETA Turkey and our 30+ User Groups. We have annual events with different concepts where we get 10+ INETA Speakers and lots of MVPs contributing to the community.

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When Microsoft released the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010 at PDC, it was regarded as the best Office product ever. It was recently proved when Microsoft released the fact that the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010 has hit 1 million downloads. Microsoft has also revamped the Office portal with some new features and a refresh look and feel.

Recently, a Polish site CentrumXP has revealed the official box art for Office 2010. You can also download the Office 2010 Icon Pack here.

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With the launch of Silverlight 4 at PDC, alot of developers are now working on the new features provided by this platform. Silverlight enables development of the next generation of Microsoft .NET based media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications also known as RIA for the World Wide Web. Here at MicrosoftFeed, we will now try to highlight different cool and interactive Silverlight applications showcasing the power of this platform. Silverlight is delivered as a cross-platform and cross-browser plug-in that exposes a programming framework and features that are a subset of the .NET Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

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At PDC last week, Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb demonstrated H.264 video streaming wirelessly using Microsoft’s Silverlight video streaming to an Apple iPhone. It seems odd but Microsoft is working with Apple to bring Silverlight on iPhone. This could be a big win for Microsoft and Silverlight developers because having the ability to get content to mobile phone users is extremely important. Although Silverlight has uses far beyond video such as developing a desktop client, developing a game or integrating with Facebook etc but it does streaming video extremely well. Do check out the launch of Silverlight 4 which was demoed by Scott Guthrie at PDC.

“The promise of Silverlight is that it’s a cross-device, cross-browser, cross-platform solution, and it works the same on Macs as it does on Windows. The iPhone is a unique scenario. We talked to our customers and they said, ‘Look, we just need to get our content there, and it’s mainly in the media space like broadcasting, and we want to put it on the iPhone.’ They have a great solution for that; if you’re surfing the Web, and hit YouTube and hit ‘Play,’ it’ll play your video because they’ve created an environment where they can safely play media, and they’re comfortable with that, So we’ve worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services, and what we’re doing is taking content that’s encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, ‘I want to enable the iPhone.’ The server will dynamically make the content work – same content, same point of origin – on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 tag, in many ways.” Brian Goldfarb – Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager

At PDC last week, Microsoft User Experience Labs released Fishbowl, a Silverlight based Facebook desktop client. Not only does Fishbowl provide a nice, clean display of your stream, but it’s packed with excellent features, responsive, and extremely intuitive to use. This application was built on Microsoft Silverlight 4 which was also released during PDC by Scott Guthrie during which a lot of cool features were introduced like Designer surface is back for Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010, printing support, support to access user’s attached web camera or microphone, notification mechanism for applications, any application in full-screen mode can have full keyboard input for things like TextBox or other input controls, Regional language support and many more. Some of the useful features of Fishbowl are:

• Discover new photos, relationships, and friend status.
• Fully integrated with Microsoft Windows 7 features such as the new taskbar so you can monitor Facebook activity and friends at a glance.
• Mini-mode offers an unobtrusive way to stay connected.
• Seamless integration with Facebook’s web so you are always just a click away.
• Fluid, snappy user interface to navigate photos quickly.
• Simply drag & drop photos into Fishbowl to have these published to Facebook.
• Sit back and watch a full screen slideshow to see your albums
• Interest level helps you filter the Facebook stream and your friends will never know it.
• Multitouch navigation and image gestures to navigate and view your photos.

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At PDC this week, Surface team announced the broad availability of the Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition. Now anyone interested in developing collaborative, engaging massive multi-touch, multi-user experiences for Surface can easily access the software at no cost through surface.com.

Previously, to design and build applications for the Surface, one needed to purchase a Surface Development unit, which as you might expect has a hefty price tag. You still need a Surface to deploy your application, but now the SDK Workstation Edition lets you use a PC to develop and a PC-based emulator to test applications with multiple mice & tag simulation tools.

Following links are enough to get the Microsoft Surface SDK 1.0 SP1 Workstation Edition, documentation, and everything else you need to build touch-enabled applications. There are also some UX guidelines, related resources, and a community section to ask your questions.

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Microsoft today at PDC released the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010. Microsoft has revamped the Office portal with some new features and a refresh look and feel. The versions that are released are Office Home and Business 2010 which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, and Office Web Apps; Office Professional 2010 which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Office Web Apps; and Office Professional Plus 2010 which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Infopath, Communicator, SharePoint Workspace, and Office Web Apps.

Most people think of Office as simply a suite of applications for getting their day-to-day work done, but it’s much more than that. It’s a platform, and you should think of its features and components as building blocks in which you can use to put together applications that help people get stuff done better, faster, and with the upcoming Office 2010, everywhere. Office 2010 Beta is finally here and available for download!

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Microsoft today at PDC released Silverlight 4 Beta. It was demoed and launched by Scott Guthrie. Lots of cool features were introduced like Designer surface is back for Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010, printing support, support to access user’s attached web camera or microphone, notification mechanism for applications, any application in full-screen mode can have full keyboard input for things like TextBox or other input controls, Regional language support, support for the Google Chrome browser and many more (Tim Heuer’s Blog).

Features:

• Tooling
• Printing API
• Right-click event handling
• Webcam/microphone access
• Mouse wheel support
• RichTextArea Control
• ICommand support
• Clipboard API
• HTML Hosting with WebBrowser
• Elevated trust applications
• Local file access
• COM interop
• Notification (“toast”) API
• Network authentication
• Cross-domain Networking changes
• Keyboard access in full screen mode
• Text trimming
• ViewBox
• Right-to-left, BiDi and complex script
• Offline DRM
• H.264 protected content
• Silverlight as a drop target
• Data binding
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• DataGrid enhancements
• Fluid UI support in items controls
• Implicit theming
• Google Chrome support

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Microsoft today at PDC released Dallas. Microsoft Codename “Dallas” is Microsoft’s Information Services business, enabling developers and information workers to instantly find, purchanse and manage datasets to power the next set of applications. If you are still confused about what Dallas is? Then Dallas team has a answer for you

Dallas is Microsoft’s Information Service, built on and part of the Windows Azure platform to provide developers and information workers with friction-free access to premium content through clean, consistent APIs as well as single-click BI/Reporting capabilities; an information marketplace allowing content providers to reach developers of ALL sizes (and developers of all sizes to gain access to content previously out of reach due to pricing, licensing, format, etc.)

Imagine you suddenly have a great idea for an app that you think would absolutely rock an app store (Windows, Apple iPhone, whatever – Dallas is cross platform service). Let’s say it’s the “Dinner and a Show” app. Where do you go to Discover, Explore, and Use the content you need? The points of interest, the restaurant reviews, the movie show times, the crime statistics if you want to add neighborhood safety, the maps and navigation if you want to provide directions, etc? Do you really want to go through N different billing relationships, different APIs, different payloads, different licensing strategies, etc? That is, assuming you can even find this data available and for sale? And do you want to shell out millions of dollars for the data just to explore a concept? Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft today at PDC released Pinpoint – the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have. Pinpoint is the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have. At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology service providers quickly and easily get software applications and professional services to market—and engage customers who need what they offer. Pinpoint is the largest directory of qualified IT companies and their software solutions built on Microsoft technologies.

• More than 7,000 software application offerings.
• More than 30,000 Microsoft-technology experts.
• The largest, most diverse set of Microsoft business platform offerings in the industry in a central location.
• Direct links between applications and the services that support them.

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Today at Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, WordPress Founder annouced the support for WordPress on Windows Azure. Matt Mullenweg Founder of Automattic discusses how the launch of PHP, MySQL and Apache made it possible to launch WordPress on Windows Azure. WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. With this announced, people will be able to host their blogs using the Windows Azure Platform. Here are some pictures from the event thanks to Long Zheng. More details coming soon!

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