OK, so PDC is over and we are back in the swing of things.

We won’t be dwelling on all the technical issues we had this past week, and the resulting silence on our blog. Frustrating? Very.

There’s too much news to cover. We are back home and back in action and will be going through all our notes and posting updates today and tomorrow. You’ve probably seen most of the news anyway – it was pleasing to see a mini-blogging revival over the last few days.

Ina Fried reports that the next version of Office may make an appearance at PDC. There’s nothing on the agenda to confirm this, but we’ll let you know if we hear anything further.

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We were chatting with a few developers the other day and one of them mentioned that he didn’t know who Scott Guthrie was.

<crickets chirped>

After we’d forgiven the poor lad for his gaff we then explained that Scott was one of those luminaries that has shaped where Microsoft is today, especially on the web side.

But Channel 9 probably has the best title for him: King of the Geeks. In this interview (from last week) Scott chats about what’s coming up for him at PDC (he’s keynoting), and how he doesn’t get nervous speaking to less than 4,000 people.

King of the Geeks indeed.

Countdown to PDC2008: King of the Geeks, Scott Guthrie, Previews PDC Keynote

There’s a few more details emerging in the lead up to PDC about Visual Studio 2010. This time Somasegar elaborates a little more on how to hunt the ‘no repro’ bug (ie bugs that are reported but hard to reproduce).

There’s nothing startlingly new in his post, except for this way cool screenshot (full size image here):

It’s going to be an exciting PDC, that’s for sure. And although a few people are complaining that all the announcements are being made before the conference, here at Microsoft Confidential, we’re pretty sure there’s gonna be a ton of stuff held back to be revealed at the last minute.

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OK Angus, you got us. We took you literally and thought there were going to be some nice little morsels revealed in David Treadwell’s chat on Channel 9.

But like LiveSide, we didn’t hear anything new either.

That said, we found it a useful interview for reviewing where Mesh is going – basically it is the fruition of a whole bunch of stuff Ray Ozzie alluded to earlier in the year. Here’s the description:

What are the platform infrastructure details behind the Mesh technologies?  Corporate Vice President of Live Platform Services, David Treadwell, will be spilling all the beans in his PDC keynote in just a few weeks, but in this Q&A he gives us a sneak peek.  David explains how there’s so much more to Mesh than just the user experience, and how he and his team will be revealing the underlying particulars that fall below the line at PDC – the platform infrastructure that helps developers build stellar Software + Services apps.  And did Tread mention bits that will be given out at the PDC?   I think he did, but you gotta listen to find out more about what we affectionately call the goods.

Source: Channel 9

We think the so called goods may just be the passing reference to the CTP of the developer tools he mentioned, but we can’t be sure. Watch for yourself and decide.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

Will you be at PDC? Come say hi if you know who we are.

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We tried to like this. Really we did. In fact we slept on this post for a bit in case we suddenly changed our mind…

Sure, it’s meant as a joke of course (the last few seconds make that clear), but we still reckon this is a steaming pile (although some people liked it). It would have been much better just talking up the 160GB drive.

Yes, see yourself out Brian.

With all the Visual Studio 2010 announcements and hoo-hah you may be wondering what the fuck this Oslo thing is they keep referring to. Don’t worry, you’re not alone – we’re all confused here at Microsoft Confidential too.

Hoping for some relief we turned to Darryl Kaft who has a good overview. Then to Don Box, the main man at Oslo HQ, who gives his thoughts here:

We’re building “Oslo” to simplify the process of developing, deploying, and managing software. Our goal is to reduce the gap between the intention of the developer and the actual artifacts that get deployed and executed. The approach we’re taking is to move more of the definition of an application into the world of data, where we (and you) can more easily make queries as to the developer’s original intent.

Clear as  mud right? He goes on:

With Oslo, we’re doing two things:

1. We’re making it easier for people to write things down in ways that make sense for the domain they are working in – the common term for this in the wild is modeling.

2. We’re making the things people wrote down accessible to platform components during program execution.

Thankfully though, we then stumbled onto the Microsoft SOA site.

Basically, it seems Oslo is a visual modelling tool that stores the details in SQL Server so you can query against it. Microsoft’s D Language sits in there somewhere too.

A few screen shots and some clear explanation would have been nice, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until PDC to get the lowdown.

I really could do with another external hard drive, they’re so handy. This is why we’re hoping to be at PDC next month. Steve Clayton alerted us to the swag (although please note the proper pronunciation is schhhhwagg).

The drives will contain some stuff. Yeah, stuff.

On Wednesday the PDC blog announced that Windows 7 would be demonstrated at PDC in October.

Windows 7 is the next version of Windows after Vista. Attendees will be given a pre-beta (whatever the fuck ‘pre-beta’ means) build of Windows 7.

It will be demonstrated by Steven Sinofsky who is the Senior Vice President of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group. He writes a long boring blog here. Don’t worry, we read it and let you know of anything worth knowing.