Windows 7 blog and PDC 2008 sessions

I was glad to see the first bits of info about the upcoming “Windows 7” product being shared through this new blog by Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven are two senior engineering managers for the “Windows 7” team and the blog, called “Engineering Windows 7 blog” or simply “E7”, is located at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/. This seems to be a big hit, with hundreds of comments to their initial post.

If you read it carefully, you will notice they point to the PDC 2008 (Professional Developers Conference) as one of the first places where you will learn more about the upcoming OS. The PDC is scheduled for October 27-30 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. A lot of event information is already posted on the site at http://microsoftpdc.com/. Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect) and Rick Rashid (Senior Vice President, Microsoft Research) will be the keynote speakers.

I always find it interesting to look of at the list of the sessions, included below for your convenience (followed by the speaker names when available). You can see that there are indeed some sessions on “Windows 7”. Other hot topics include the Live Platform, Cloud Services, Silverlight, “Oslo”, Internet Explorer 8, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio, just to name a few. If the list below peaks your interest, check the full details on each session in the event web site. Seems to me that this PDC will be a sold out event… :-)

• A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer
• A Lap around "Oslo" (Douglas Purdy)
• A Lap around Building Block Services (Dennis Pilarinos, John Shewchuk)
• A Lap around SQL Server Data Services (Soumitra Sengupta)
• Agile Development with Microsoft Visual Studio (Stephanie Saad)
• An Introduction to Microsoft F# (Luke Hoban, Don Syme)
• Architecting Services for the Cloud (Yousef Khalidi)
• Architecture without Big Design Up Front (Peter Provost)
• ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications
• ASP.NET: Future Roadmap
• Claims-Based Identity: A Security Model for Connected Applications
• Concurrency Runtime Deep Dive: How to Harvest Multicore Computing Resources (Niklas Gustafsson)
• Connecting Active Directory to Microsoft Cloud Services (Tore Sundelin)
• Deep Dive: Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive App in Silverlight
• Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in .NET (Jim Hugunin)
• Deep Dive: The New Rendering Engine in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8
• Deep Dive: Understanding the Microsoft Silverlight Subset of Windows Presentation Foundation
• Deploying Web Applications with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 and the Web Deployment Tool
• Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service (Steve Marx)
• Developing Applications Using Data Services (Pablo Castro, Mike Flasko)
• Developing Connected Home Applications and Services for Windows Home Server (Angel Marruedo, CJ Saretto)
• Developing Solutions for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Using WMI
• Developing with Microsoft .NET and ASP.NET for Server Core
• Enabling Test Automation Using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (Taylor Brown)
• Entity Framework Futures (Tim Mallalieu)
• Exposing Connected Home Services to the Internet via Windows Home Server (Brendan Grant, CJ Saretto)
• Extending Windows Workflow Foundation v.Next with Custom Activities (Matt Winkler)
• Future Directions for Microsoft Visual Basic (Paul Vick)
• Hosting Workflows and Services in "Oslo" (Ford McKinstry)
• How to Develop Supercomputer Applications
• Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (Steve Carroll, Ed Glas)
• Live Platform: Architecture and Advanced Programming Techniques (Dharma Shukla)
• Live Platform: Building Applications with Social Data (Angus Logan)
• Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications (Andres Sanabria)
• Live Platform: Deep Dive on Microsoft Virtual Earth (Mark Brown)
• Live Platform: Identity Services (Jorgen Thelin)
• Live Platform: Integrating Advanced Live Search Capabilities (Alessandro Catorcini)
• Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive (Abolade Gbadegesin)
• Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs (Ori Amiga)
• Messaging Services Deep Dive: Trust Zones, Data Centers, and Multi-Tenant Services at Scale (Clemens Vasters)
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Developing Business Applications (Humberto Lezama Guadarrama)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8: Developer Overview
• Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 and Beyond
• Microsoft Silverlight 2: Control Model
• Microsoft Silverlight: Building Business Applications
• Microsoft Silverlight: Developing for Mobile Devices
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Business Intelligence and Data Visualization (Stella Chan)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Deep Dive into Spatial Data (Isaac Kunen)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Developing for Semi-Structured Data (Michael Rys)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008: Developing Large Scale Web Applications and Services (Jose Blakeley)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008: New and Future T-SQL Programmability (Michael Wang)
• Microsoft SQL Server: Data-Driven Applications from Device to Cloud (David Campbell)
• Microsoft Visual C++: 10 Is the New 6 (Tarek Madkour)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft (Brian Harry)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Software Diagnostics and Quality for Services (Habib Heydarian, Justin Marks)
• Microsoft Visual Studio: Bringing out the Best in Multicore Systems (Hazim Shafi)
• Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale (Niranjan Nilakantan)
• Office Business Applications: Enhanced Deployment (Saurabh Bhatia, Andrew Whitechapel)
• Offline-Enabled Data Services and Desktop Applications (Mike Flasko, Lev Novik)
• "Oslo": Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience (Florian Voss)
• "Oslo": Managing Software + Services Applications (Oliver Sharp)
• "Oslo": Repository and Schemas (Martin Gudgin, Chris Sells)
• "Oslo": The Language (Don Box, David Langworthy)
• Parallel Programming for C++ Developers in the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio (Stephen Toub)
• Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio (Daniel Moth)
• Project "Velocity": A First Look (Nithya Sampathkumar)
• Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud (Bradley Calder)
• Securing Your Service Using the Federated Identity Services (Justin Smith)
• SQL Server Data Services: Futures (Patric McElroy)
• The Future of C# (Anders Hejlsberg)
• Under the Hood: Advances in COM Interop (Misha Shneerson)
• Under the Hood: Building SQL Server Data Services (Istvan Cseri, Gopal Kakivaya)
• Unified Communications: Futures
• Windows 7: Graphics Advances
• Windows 7: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Battery Life
• Windows 7: Touch Computing
• Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code
• Windows Mobile: Location, Location, Location
• Windows Mobile: Optimizing Web Development for Devices
• Windows Presentation Foundation: Extensible BitmapEffects, Pixel Shaders, and WPF Graphics Futures
• Windows Workflow Foundation: Futures (Kenneth Wolf)
• Workflow Services (Ed Pinto)
• Workflow Services: Orchestrating Services and Business Processes (Moustafa Ahmed)

Note: Sessions are subject to change and this is just a snapshot of how they appear on the event site as of today. You should obviously use the constantly updated event site at https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx as your reference. Check the full terms at http://microsoftpdc.com/Terms.aspx.