Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Microsoft Cancels Major Developers' Conference

Posted by kdawson on from the don't-distracte-me-from-Vista dept.

Kurtz'sKompund writes "Microsoft has cancelled its autumn Professional Developers Conference, citing bad timing in light of the launch of important infrastructure and platform products. This isn't the first time they have cancelled a PDC, for similar reasons."

1 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Not really indicative of anything: Tech Ed's on by kendor · · Score: 2, Informative
    Not sure this is really news in the way that some might think it. A few reasons:


    PDC is not Microsoft's preeminent developer conference. Tech Ed 200X is. My understanding is that TE is Microsoft's biggest developer conference, and it's running next week, June 4-8 (or 3-8 if you registered for the pre-conference sessions.) Picture 10,0000+ geeks trying hard to make dinner conversation, cavernous convention halls, and (literally) dawn-to-dusk classes and sessions for six days. Quite an experience.

    Conferences get cancelled all the time for all kinds of reasons: I was scheduled to go to Lynda.com's DX3 in Boston, and it got nixed a few weeks out, probably because of competition from FlashForward, MIX, and TechEd. Conferences can get nuked for any of a number of reasons: attendence, competing events, a sense of quiet. I'd rather they schedule developer conferences for when they're warranted, rather than trying to hype up whatever's finished according to a timetable.

    In this case, we're in something of a quiet period: SQL Server 2005 and VS.NET 2005 have been released, ASP.NET 2.0 has been out for awhile, and everyone's waiting for the next big shoes to fall: the growth (or failure) of Silverlight, an ORM-ish technology called LINQ, and the next version of VS.NET, which will fold a lot of web dev/expression stuff into VS.NET. My guess is that "Orcas" will be an extremely significant release for MSFT, in that it will finally turn a wo rld class programming/DB interaction environment into a tool that advanced designers and Dreamweaver users will want to use.

    All of that's a bit off, and so for now, a quiet conference schedule may represent some honesty from Redmond. Personally, among Microsft technologies, I'm currently most excited about some of the third-party stuff coming out. Check out the controls offered by Telerik, or even more gee-whiz cool, the just-released EntitySpaces 2007 ORM framework. Awesome tools. I think Mike & Co. just released this to production yesterday.

    BTW, I will be at Tech Ed if anyone wants to meet over junk food and ice cream. As I have a bit of a background programming Actionscript, I'm interested particularly in seeing what Expression/Silverlight can do.