PDC09 – L.A. Day 3 Coverage

Here we go again, it’s Day 3 and it looks like a much quieter day. Today I‘m skipping sessions in order to walk around the PDC 2009 Expo Hall a little bit, where Microsoft and its Partners show the latest and greatest in software and hardware technology. So don’t expect a technical deep-dive, but rather a safari-style report of the last da–the reason for that is actually that there are only very developer-focused sessions running.

Here are my impressions from the last day:

Los Angeles Convention Center

Playing around with the Surface Table set up at the EXPO Hall

It is very apparent that Microsoft is focused on Multi-touch and alternative input methods. They are slowly but steadily trying to get away from the classic mouse and keyboard combination.

Over at the Microsoft Live Labs, we learned about a wonderful new technology called Pivot that’s capable of visualizing huge amounts of data and sorting them by any type of filter you want. It was a very impressive demo.

We also managed to get a couple of beta invitation codes for our blog readers. Each of these codes is good for 10 registrations, so better hurry up:

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Simply go to www.getpivot.com and use the registration code below for installation. Check out the video first and see how amazing this interface and management system actually is. I was blown away!

Fellow bloggers Rafael Riviera from www.withinwindows.com and Tom Warren from www.neowin.net trying to get some tidbits on IE9

Even more multitouch demos, this time with some great zoom and rotation features

Microsoft goes to the cloud: Windows Azure is gearing up to be a major cloud computing platform. They already have two huge data centers in the U.S., and two more will be added next year in Europe and Asia.

And that is it for today folks! I attended a couple of sessions and had many interviews with the folks at Microsoft, which I’ll be bringing you over the course of the next few weeks. There will be some interesting features coming, like one focusing on DirectX 11 DirectComputer and how it’s helping increase performance by putting the workload off the CPU.

All in all, I’m very satisfied with this year’s PDC. Although it wasn’t as exciting as last year’s (they presented Windows 7 to the public for the first time there), we still managed to get some great information on Office 2010, IE9, and Windows 7. Hope you enjoyed the last couple of blog posts!

Signing off from LA,
Sandro