News
Microsoft PDC Is Back On
- By Barbara Darrow
- December 6, 2007
The next Professional Developers
Conference
will take place on October 27-30 in Los Angeles, according to e-mail sent Thursday. The event is back on the schedule, after a year's hiatus.
Microsoft nixed PDC 2007 that was to have been held last October; the announcement came last spring.
The company bills PDC as "the definitive Microsoft event for software developers and architects," so the cancellation raised questions, even though observers criticized Microsoft for event glut in the last few years.
Critics have also slammed the company for failure to deliver on most all of the promises made at PDC 2003, where it had talked up the infamous "pillars" of Longhorn. Nearly all failed to appear anywhere near on schedule, and most are being fitted retroactively to run with Windows XP.
Since that conference, the company had to split the Longhorn release into the Vista client, launched early this year, and Windows Server 2008, slated to officially debut in February. Both were/are very late.
One of the implicit messages from PDC 2007 cancellation was that Microsoft wanted to make sure there was lots to talk about. By next fall, the company should be well on its way to the next Visual Studio release, code named "Rosario."
In the meantime, developers hope to have had final releases of Windows
2008 and SQL Server 2008 in their hands for several months going into PDC 2008.
About the Author
Barbara Darrow is RDN’s industry editor.