Top 10 New Technologies at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2009

Top 10 New Technologies at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference 2009 By Darryl K. Taft

On Nov. 18, at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft unveiled a beta version of Silverlight 4. This latest version delivers hundreds of features and controls that, when combined with Microsoft’s tools for designers and developers- Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend-enable rapid application development. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in that helps companies design, develop and deliver Web applications.

Microsoft delivered a few details on IE9 at the PDC on Nov. 18. At the PDC, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, said Microsoft has made some significant improvements in it compatibility with the Acid3 test of Web performance and capabilities. Sinofsky said IE8 had a score of 20, and IE9 already has a score of 32. Meanwhile, in terms of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 3 standard, Sinofsky said IE9 has passed 572 out of 578 of the CSS 3 tests. Acid3 is a test page from the Web Standards Project that checks how well a Web browser follows certain selected elements from Web standards, especially relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript.

Microsoft’s codename “Dallas” is a new service allowing developers and information workers to easily discover, purchase and manage premium data subscriptions in the Windows Azure platform. Dallas is an information marketplace that brings data, imagery and real-time Web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources together into a single location, under a unified provisioning and billing framework.

Pinpoint is an online marketplace created to help customers easily find solutions. Pinpoint is a 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 get software applications and professional services to market-and engage customers who need what they offer.

Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Business, said with Windows Azure, next year Microsoft will be entering into beta Project Sydney, a new project that will enable users to connect their existing servers inside of their data center together with services that are running with Windows Azure.

Microsoft’s new AppFabric comes in two flavors: Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric. Windows Server AppFabric evolves the traditional application server category, which has matured with many advances in hardware and “scale-up” architectures to allow for mission-critical applications. At the same time, innovation has occurred to support emerging cloud-based platforms, which typically rely on elastic “scale-out” techniques to support massive scale and high reliability using large numbers of commodity servers. With AppFabric, Microsoft is blending the best of both worlds – evolving the mature and familiar application server technologies in Microsoft .Net and Windows Server and combining them with next-generation fabric innovation used today in the Windows Azure platform.

Pivot is an application intended to make it easier to view and interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun. It enables the visualization of trends in related information using Microsoft’s own Seadragon technology. Pivot is currently available by invitation only to a small technical audience, but users can learn more by visiting the Pivot Website at ‘http://www.getpivot.com/.

Microsoft announced the release of the public betas of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Visio 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 and Office Web Apps for business customers. The 2010 release is designed to give people the best productivity experience across PCs, phones and browsers. The betas can be downloaded at a href=’http://www.microsoft.com/2010′ target=’_blank’>http://www.microsoft.com/2010.

SQL Server Modeling (formerly codenamed “Oslo”) is a set of future technologies designed to deliver significant productivity gains across the lifecycle of .Net applications by enabling developers, architects and IT professionals to work together more effectively with SQL Server at the center of the application lifecycle. Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview of the technology at the PDC.

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. Microsoft announced that Windows Azure will be production ready as of Jan. 1, 2010.