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Microsoft PDC Leftovers

There sure have been a lot of announcements at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference this week. We say that with a touch of incredulity because the PDC always struck us as being a tad esoteric and not having the broad-based appeal of, say, Tech-Ed.

OK, granted, Azure is more of a development platform than anything else, so it makes sense to announce it to developers. But it's also a critical part of an overall SaaS -- sorry, S+S -- strategy, so we might have expected an unveiling at a different, somewhat more inclusive conference. (And that goes double for Windows 7, even though developers will take some interest in it, as well.) Oh, well...it all ends up on the Internet, anyway, right?

Anyway, between Azure and Windows 7, PDC has been the most eventful Microsoft show for quite a while. We've commented ourselves into carpal tunnel syndrome this week writing about it, so for the last RCPU of the week, we're just serving up links to stories you might have missed:

There was a Windows Server 2008 R2 preview.

Live Mesh and Live Framework got some air time.

Redmond Developer News's Kathleen Richards brings us a story on cloud-based SQL services.

And here's something about Visual Studio for the Skittles and Mountain Dew crowd (the PDC target audience, after all).

Posted by Lee Pender on October 30, 2008


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