6:00 pm: An afternoon of meetings are over. I think I'm finally starting to grasp how Windows Azure works (it only took a year) and how it really differs from classic, on-premise Windows Server. The big change since PDC 2009 is that Microsoft heard from developers that they weren't only interested in hosting new applications on Azure; they also wanted to move existing apps to the new platform and transform them, sometimes over time, to utilize new Azure capabilities. So this has been a big focus of the past year. This will also result in a number of articles, I guess, but it might even be early next week before that happens.
11:10 am: From the session, some interesting advice about moving from traditional menu/toolbar-based apps to a ribbon UI. Resist the urge to map menus to ribbon tabs. Think in scenarios ("what users want to do").
Pic from Tom:
10:50 am: Going to attend Windows Ribbon: Technical Deep Dive session with Rafael, Tom, and Andrew. Then it's back to back meetings for the rest of the day.
10:30 am: So it's hard not to be underwhelmed here. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this is big stuff. But it's not interesting stuff. And the problem there is that you sort of see a future where Microsoft is a big and successful company but is no longer interesting. Comparisons to IBM are, of course, both obvious and apt.
Keynote appears to be winding down.
I'm in the press room covering the PDC 2009 Day 1 keynote event. Follow along live on my PDC 2009 page.
Blurry image from my wake-up call this morning at 6:00 am:
