Developer Conference Announced

The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) will be held Nov. 17 through 20 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with pre-conference sessions Nov. 16. The PDC gives senior developers and architects early access to key technologies, and the timing suggests that the next versions of Office and SharePoint (both code-named 14), expected to be released late 2009 or early 2010, will be covered in detail at the conference.

The Azure Services Platform (Microsoft’s cloud computing initiative), Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio Team System 2010, and the .NET Framework 4.0 are also expected to be released late 2009 or early 2010 and should get coverage, although PDC 2008 focused extensively on these products.

Microsoft’s TechEd North America conference, planned for May 2009, covers current products for business decision-makers and IT personnel and is unlikely to provide new details of products to be released later in the year. Consequently, organizations might want to send attendees to PDC 2009, rather than TechEd, if they need product roadmaps and information on future technologies for IT planning. However, the registration link that Microsoft provides for PDC 2009 currently returns PDC 2008 information, and Microsoft has not yet announced when more details will be available.