PDC 2009 News

I didn’t make it to PDC 2009, but have been watching the twitter feeds, rss, and live videos to be sure I’m up on all the latest goodies.  Unfortunately, that won’t get me a free multitouch tablet PC, but here are some of the other cool things that have come out of this year’s conference so far:

• General availability of Surface SDK.  You used to have to pay $10k for a big ass table and the rights to develop for it.  Now you can just download the SDK and go crazy.  Of course, you’ll still need the table if you want to actually use your app.
• Microsoft code-name “Dallas” aggregates quality content for you to mash up and use in your apps, providing strongly-typed classes to let you query and work with things like crime stats, GIS info, and news.
• Microsoft Pinpoint is a new ‘app store’ for various windows apps and services.
• Windows Server AppFabric helps you build scalable web and composite apps by providing caching, Workflow, WCF, and other services for your .NET apps.
• Several new Web App Toolkits to give you a head start on common web apps.
• A training kit,  update to the Azure SDK and Microsoft Sync support for SQL Azure
• A ROI calculator for Azure.
• Silverlight 4 Beta

SQL Server Management Studio now supports SQL Azure

One of the pain points in my series on porting nopCommerce to Azure was that SQL Management Studio did not readily support SQL Azure.  You could get it to work with a little fiddling and ignoring a few errors, but it was far from ideal.  Well, now this has been addressed with SQL Server 2008 R2 Management Studio.  This is a CTP, but then again, so is the rest of Azure!