Will Steve Ballmer Speak At WWDC Keynote?

truthsearch writes "An analyst reports that not only will CEO Steve Jobs return to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference stage — he missed last year for medical reasons — but he will be joined there by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdrey said that Microsoft has been given seven minutes during Jobs' keynote to talk about Visual Studio 2010. Chowdrey said that a new version of the development tools software will support native applications for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS." Update: 05/27 19:17 GMT by T : As reader theappwhisperer points out, Microsoft has responded to this rumor via the company's Twitter feed with an unequivocal No.

Comments

DoJ dodging

[TheKidWho]

Seems like they're trying to dodge the DoJ by adding "competition."

Regardless this is pretty nice, it means I can developed for my iPad/Phone/Pod on my core i7 desktop rather then my 4 year old iMac.

Rubbish

[DavidR1991]

It won't be MSVC. It'll be the new Office for Mac introduction.

Re:Rubbish

[Yvan256]

And maybe also official Windows 7 support via boot camp. Why else give him seven minutes?

Re:Rubbish

[dc29A]

Or Bing as default search engine for Safari ... The enemy of my enemy is my friend you know ...

Re:Rubbish

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Six for dancing and sweating, one for talking.

Re:Rubbish

[Cronock]

I will die a little inside if this happens. I do suspect Apple to do something like this, but I know I'll be changing it right away. Even though Google is staring to become the Evil it once denounced, it's still a great search engine.

Bound to be a big win

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I feel certain that most Apple developers would rather stick needles in their eyes than use Visual Studio. For one thing, it's more visually appealing.

Re:Bound to be a big win

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel certain that most Apple developers would rather stick needles in their eyes than use Visual Studio. For one thing, it's more visually appealing.

Yes, but only for the people watching the developers stick needles in their eyes.

Re:Bound to be a big win

[Ares]

having used apple's developer tools after spending years using microsoft's, let me assure you that apple's ease of use advantage ends when you open up xcode. sure you get used to gui design in interface builder, but vs is still orders of magnitude easier. therefore, the only developers who would rather stick needles in their eyes than use microsoft tools are those who have never used microsoft tools to begin with.

this, of course, makes no commentary on the quality of code that ultimately results from the use of the respective tools, just the ease of use of the tools themselves.

Re:Bound to be a big win

[Monkeedude1212]

Basically what you said, I think its not so much about Apple Developers choosing Visual Studio, but Visual Studio developers being able to work on Apple Applications.

Re:huh?

[Altus]

This doesn't sound like they will port it to the mac. In fact I think that would be pretty bad, the UI is just totally in apropirate. It sounds more like apple is trying to find a way to let people develop for the iPhone and the iPad (and maybe the mac as well) using a PC. This could be very useful for iPhone developers.

While I'm not sure developing mac applications on windows makes much sense, it could be very nice for setting up automated build machines in a mixed platform development environment.

In this corner...

[Quiet_Desperation]

I'm guessing an eight round electrified cage match with Jobs and Ballmer in Mexican wrestling masks and refereed by Chuck Norris

It will be inconclusive for seven rounds until Jobs seriously injures Ballmer with a flying clothesline after Ballmer cheats with a folding chair strike to Jobs' liver. Ballmer will tag in Bill Gates, but Jobs will tag in Phil Schiller. Schiller will then proceed to completely own Gates and win the match with a shining wizard followed by a dragon whip and atomic crotch punch.

The result will be Apple's market cap continuing to stomp on Microsoft's, and the kickoff of Phil's worldwide "Schillermania" tour.

XCode for Windoze?

[pak9rabid]

Instead of this, why doesn't Apple just release XCode for Windows? Seems to me that would make far more sense than getting in bed with MS.

Re:I can only imagine what Ballmer will say.

[HerculesMO]

Well Yahoo, AOL, and Pets.com also had high market valuations at one point too.

Look how that turned out.

All it says is that Apple owns all of its own manufacturing and equipment and makes a LOT of expensive hardware. MS sells software, mostly.

This is the dumbest rumor I've heard in years

[paulschreiber]

There is no way Apple will let you develop for the iPhone OS using MS' developer toolchain. No way whatsoever. I'll bet Trip Chowdrey $500 right now this doesn't happen.

Re:This is the dumbest rumor I've heard in years

[TheRaven64]

Clang already builds on Windows and can be used from Visual Studio. Adding Objective-C syntax highlighting and code completion to Visual Studio wouldn't be too hard (the code for doing it is in clang already, it just needs connecting up to hooks in Visual Studio). Letting people develop for the iPhone without buying a Mac might be a good strategic decision for Apple, and only having to maintain an Interface Builder port for Windows, rather than a complete XCode port, would save them some money.

I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[melted]

And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it. Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[Ares]

And I had been using Microsoft tools for 15 years before looking at them. Sure, it's jarring at first, but you get used to it.

definitely. and it doesn't take a terribly long time for it either. i was looking at it from the perspective that apple has traditionally concentrated on ease of use in its entire environment. having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water. It's not even close.

you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[nmb3000]

Apple's APIs on the other hand, completely blow Microsoft Win32 out of the water.

That's hardly a fair comparison. The Win32 API is 15+ years old. It was built to support the previous 16-bit Win16 API. It spans the development of about 8 major operating systems.

Newer portions of the Windows API being introduced with Vista and Win7 are a lot better than most of the older stuff and the integration of .NET into Windows has pretty much given you a completely re-written object-oriented approach to the Win32 API (still lacking some of the more low-level stuff, but interop exists for the few cases you need those).

Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[UnknowingFool]

Apple's Carbon APIs are by comparison at least 9 years old when Apple moved from System 9 to OS X around 2001. However if you count legacy, Cocoa is based on NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP which go back to the 1980s. The deprecated Classic API goes back to System OS which also goes back to the 1980s as well.

The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple went through the APIs during the transition and cleaned them up. I remember reading somewhere that they reduced the number of APIs from 8,000 to 2,000. Apple having been written off by many back then had fewer developers to migrate. MS code has a lot of legacy and with iteration, it gets harder for MS to remove legacy parts and so the code bloat continues.

Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[EMB Numbers]

Apple's Cocoa frameworks started out as NeXTstep in 1988 (22 years ago) and have changed only incrementally since. Microsoft should have been embarrassed to ship Win16 let alone Win32.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient

[NJRoadfan]

having to manually set up outlets and actions in the code so that they can be referenced by ib seems counterintuitive to that history. with vs on the other hand, it "just happens". i.e., double click on a button in the ui view and you get its onclick event handler. if it doesn't exist, it gets created.

XCode and IB remind me of developing with Borland C++ circa 1995 or so. Create the GUI in a seperate app and then load a project in the main IDE to code and compile. VS.NET (And VB before it) simplify it. Create GUI objects, double click on the object and access the code for the events behind that function.

you ain't kidding on that. even compared to mfc, apple wins. how microsoft managed to promote mfc for years without registry and security attribute classes representing critical aspects of the underlying operating system is beyond me.

MFC was a joke. I never bothered to learn how to program with it. Win32 isn't exactly intuitive to build an OO framework on. Borland managed to do it somewhat better with VCL, but it was never popular. dotNet works well, but having to do anything low level with Win32 requires some ugly looking code.

I can see it now...

[sophomoric]

I can see it now... Steve Jobs walks on stage after Ballmer finishes and says: That's great Ballmer, but unfortunately we're not going to be able to accept any apps created in Visual Studio, but thanks anyways.

People actually like Visual Studio?

[tylersoze]

One of the most surprising aspects coming out of this rumor (which is complete and utter BS BTW, I wish I could get a job where I could just spout crazy BS all day, as opposed to just doing it for fun on slashdot :) is learning that people actually *like* Visual Studio? Who knew? I mean XCode has its problems, but I can't wait to get home after a day of working with VS and open up XCode and have some fun do iPhone coding.

Tech-Ed != WWDC

[AwaxSlashdot]

Yeah sure, Steve Ballmer will very likely speak about VisualStudio 2010 on June the 7th. But this will be at Microsoft Tech-Ed, developper and IT professionnal conference.

How a miss-informed analyst can shake the web by spitting improbable rumours.

(I won't talk about the fact that VS10 is deeply oriented towards the introduction of .NET 4.0 and corresponding C# evolutions, that VS has currently no ObjC parser — and will never include GCC even if it is Apple reference compiler — and that VS GUI editors are built for WinForms and WPF/SilverLight, not Cocoa, so this just ends leveraging their syntax highlighting text editor)

Developers, developers, developers...

[Minwee]

If Steve Ballmer is giving it, wouldn't that make it the WWDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDC keynote?

Re:huh?

[TheRaven64]

Anyway, I'm sure MS Office is still pretty big on Mac OS.

Not as big as OpenOffice.org. Fortunately, new Macs ship with 4GB of RAM or more...

MS Official Twitter account says Nope

[genghisjahn]

"Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI."

http://twitter.com/microsoft

Re:huh?

[s73v3r]

Whoever wrote that method did a poor job of naming it. The proper way to do so would be:

[obj setVectorWithX: x, Y:y, Z:z]

Re:huh?

[jeremyp]

Technically, Objective C's parameters aren't named, they are just embedded in the method name.

[obj setVector: x y: y z: z] is a different method to [obj setVector: x z: z y: y]

Also, your assertion that the first parameter name is omitted is completely spurious. No Objective-C programmer would name the method as you have done. They would use

[obj setVectorX: x y: y z: z];