by Mary Jo Foley
When Microsoft opened up registration for its Professional Developers Conference in early August, company officials shared previews of 25 of the planned sessions.
On September 1, Microsoft published 31 more PDC session descriptions. Not too surprisingly, given that Microsoft plans to remove the “beta” designation from its Azure hosting platform around the time of the show, there are lots more Azure developer sessions now on the PDC docket (including one that promises to detail how Azure has changed since Microsoft first described it at last year’s PDC and where it’s going in the future). As I blogged recently, Microsoft’s been removing a number of the pieces of the Azure cloud platform company officials outlined last year.
There are a couple of new sessions on the SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight realtime complex-event-processing technology that Microsoft recently released to testers. For Windows and Windows Server developers, there are some new sessions on Windows Communications Foundation 4.0 and the Dublin app server.
This year’s PDC is slated for mid-November. I’m hearing Microsoft may be moving back toward making PDC an annual event, but no official confirmation of that… Also, somewhat surprisingly, there are still no sessions listed on Windows Mobile (either 6.5 or 7.0). But Microsoft is trickling out the session abstracts gradually, so there’s still hope for mobile developers looking for more meat.