Microsoft PDC 2010 Highlights (Day–1)

At Microsoft PDC 2010, the first day event was started by Steve Ballmer with a Keynote. His keynote was started with IE9, HTML5, Windows Phone 7 and Azure.

In this post, I will highlights some of them for you.

Internet Explorer 9 and HTML5

Internet Explorer 9 Keynote was started with Dean Hachamovitch at PDC2010. Dean demonstrated some cool demos of HTML5 and CSS3 which run on Internet Explorer 9 very smoothly. He also demonstrated some cool features of IE9 like Windows 7 Taskbar Integration. If you don’t have IE9 till date, you can download and install the Platform Preview 6 from Microsoft Download site.

Windows Phone 7

Next Windows Phone 7 keynote was started by a cool Video. “Oh! Really?” – This was the main term used in the video. ScottGu started the Keynote for WP7. There was some cool demonstrations of apps like Facebook, Amazon Kindle, TaxCaster for Windows Phone 7. ScottGu gave some introduction on Windows Phone 7 coding using Visual Studio 2010. Also, there was an interesting presentation for Windows Phone 7 profiler like Frame rate, CPU usage etc. etc.

Windows Azure

After WP7 keynotes, they moved to Cloud, the Windows Azure. They mentioned about the current status of platform. They mentioned that everything like Server, VMs, Storage are now moving to the Cloud. There they also mentioned about the new OData Discovery Service, which looks at the web for any endpoints feeding data. Mark gave a cool demo on Windows Azure. He demonstrated the TFS on cloud too, which was really very interesting. Also the support for OAuth for OpenID’s caught the eyes. The coolest feature demo was the VM and IIS Manager support in Cloud through RDP access.

The Future of C# and VB.Net

Visual Studio Async, which is very nice framework for doing the async call in C# 5.0 was one of the next item. It was the most eye catching announcement “The future of C# and VB.Net”. In the new compiler they added new keywords called “await” and “async” which will instruct the compiler to generate a state machine around the async code.

If you want to know more about C# 5.0 features, read the C# 5.0 Whitepaper. The Visual Studio Async CTP version is now available and you can download it from Visual Studio Developer Center.