Microsoft PDC at India Development Center – Hyderabad

After attending the Community Tech days earlier this year,I got a chance to be at the very same place once again to attend PDC Nights at the India Development center in Hyderabad.What is so unique about this year's PDC is that Microsoft has taken a different way of interacting with Developers working on Microsoft's platform and MVP's by conducting it simultaneously at various places all over the world with 30,000 participants.

Before we could start watching the Live PDC stream from Redmond,We interacted with the head of the Mobile Application platform.It was also a good chance to interact with some my fellow MVP's who like me were attending a Microsoft event for the first time.



After watching Steve Ballmer's keynote,it was time to take note of Microsoft's latest offering in the Mobile ecosystem,the Windows Phone7.It remains to bee seen how the Windows phone 7 will be received,but since there are loads of developers out there who already work on Visual Studio, Apple's Iphone might be facing a strong competitor in terms of app development.Some cool apps which were created for the windows phone 7 were demonstrated.Also included in the demos were how to develop an app by using a Visual Studio Express edition for Windows Phone 7 by using a live Emulator of the Windows Phone.

The main focus of Microsoft other than the Mobile and Windows platforms has been the cloud.The inclusion of a Cloud computing platform in its portfolio completes the trivia of Technology platforms.Cloud computing on its part reaches far and wide across the boundaries and it certainly has a promising future for SME's and Corporations who cannot afford or maintain large number of Data Centers of their own.An interesting example was demonstrated in this regard.Pixar studios which requires exponential computing capabilities utilized the Windows Azure platform to render their animation sequences.The Pixar head also mentioned that If they had to rely on rendering a 1140 frame sequence on todays single processing machines,it would take them approximately 124 years to complete the rendering sequence! On the the other hand since the Cloud computing platform is scalable in nature,it provides the same rendering and completes it in approximately 2 hours.

According to Microsoft today's cloud computing environments have 3 main services in the offering.The well known SaaS(Software as a service),Platform as a service(SQL server Azure,Virtual Machine hosting,Visual studio),Infrastructure as a service(Data center computing power as explained in Pixar's case)


For now we have seen how Amazon's EC2,Microsoft's Azure and Ubuntu's One service have come out.These are certainly interesting times and more such scalable technologies may bring number crunching computing to affordable levels


It was fun to be at the event,I am still a noob at Visual studio and stuff but may want to learn more as and when I interact with more number of people along the way...