Bummer… the PDC conference previously scheduled for this October in La-La land is being postponed until further notice.

As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed ?Katmai,? Visual Studio codenamed ?Orcas? and Silverlight will already be in developers? hands and approaching launch, which is where we?ll focus our developer engagement in the near term.

Now don’t read into this as being a sign of any upcoming product delays. I thought it was strange that TechEd and PDC were scheduled 4-months apart to begin with. That’s a lot of planning to squeeze in a short of time. Plus it’s a *ton* of work for the product groups to work on their messaging and demos for both conferences while still providing value for one versus the other. As an attendee of both conferences, you wouldn’t want to see the same material repeated, would you?

I know some people were planning on attending PDC this year over TechEd. The good news is that registration is still open for TechEd. The bad news is I’m sure the hotels have been sucked dry by now.

Keep an eye on the PDC Event page for any updates.

Update: The code 6026-DevBMO13-1488is working. Please use this code to register for the free E-Learning courses at http://www.microsoft.com/learning/access. You can only register once per Live ID.

For those of you who attended the CNUG meeting last night and are trying to registeryour free E-Learning vouchers, please hold tight. Apparently the little hamsters powering the site have decided to jump off their wheels for the time being and we’re currently trying to entice them to get back on.

Keep an eye out here for any updates.

I'm attending the php|tek conference in Chicago today and tomorrow. At the moment, I'm sitting in a session with our very own Joe Stagner from the ASP.NET team where Joe's is presenting the Microsoft AJAX Library (scroll down to the bottom of the page to download the ZIP library) and how to incorperate it into your PHP applications.

A couple of interesting items that Joe pointed out during his talk.

First, when Joe asked the question “Is everyone aware that Microsoft provides FREE development tools?” And most people shook their head “No”. These tools that Joe was referring to is our Visual Studio ExpressEditions. These editions come in many flavors depending on what type of developmentyou want to do:

Visual Web Developer Express Edition- Productivity that is ideal for first time or casual Windows programming.

Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition- Productivity that is ideal for first time or casual Windows programming.

Visual C# Express Edition- A great combination of power and productivity for the Windows developer.

Visual C++ Express Edition- Horsepower with a finer degree of control than other Express Editions.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition- A powerful and easy-to-use database to complement each Express Edition.

XNA Game Studio Express- based on Visual C# Express Edition and allows you to create games for both Windows PC’s and the Xbox 360.

Also, for those PHP developers out there who may be interested in learning more about Microsoft's web technologies may want to check the Microsoft Web Developer Learning Series. Thislearning series brings together over 80 (!) learning modules, including 6 virtual labs, 28 on-demand sessions and 47 live webcasts. These modules focus on topics such as ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and our recently released Expression product suite. There is a special track just for PHP developers.

We’re starting to see Visual Studio Team System User Groups starting to pop up in our area. Chicago’s has a VSTS group (no group site just yet) and they’ve held twomeetings all ready (sorry for slacking on my blogging duties and not informing you in time that there was a group – a mistake I don’t plan to make again).

There’s also a group starting up in Indianapolis as a Special Interest Group of the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association (IndyNDA). Their plan is to meet every 4th Wednesday of the month. Here are the details of their kickoff meeting on May 23rd…

When:
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 @ 6:00PM

Where:
Microsoft Corporation
Parkwood Business Park, Building Four
500 E. 96th St., Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240

Click here to register

I would like to thank everyone who came out for the OnRamp240 events in Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago over the past week. We had a great discussion around the Microsoft web development platform, including the greatExpression tools that are sure to please many a web developer and designers out there and not to mention taking a dip in the Silverlight waters for a brief time. There is surely more to come from these great tools and technologies.

As I was able to relay to some of you (Sorry, Indy), the Expression Web product discs are currently on the assembly line and should be shipping out around May 28th. If you attended the OnRamp240 session and filled out an evaluation, you should be receiveing your copy in the mail shortly thereafter.

There are quite a few resources I pointed out during the session and I promised all of you that I would post them here.

First and foremost, no one should miss ScottGu’s keynote from the MIX’07 conference. Scott lays out the full Silverlight story and invites a number of customer’s up on stage to show what they’ve been able to do with the technology in a short amount of time. Simply one of the best keynotes I’ve ever seen and not to be missed!

For the developers, Ihighlyrecommend viewing Omar Khan’s MIX’07 session on Using Visual Studio Codename “Orcas” to Design and Develop Rich AJAX Enabled Web Sites. The Javascript Intellisense feature and debugging support is enough for any Javascript developer to take notice.

Unfortunately we had a short amount of time to cover a lot of material. We weren’t able to go into ASP.NET AJAX as I would’ve like and some of you might have hoped. No worries, though. Head on over to the ASP.NET AJAX Community Site and check out Joe Stagner’s “How-To” video collection on ASP.NET AJAX.

For those of you looking to make the plunge into Silverlight. Everything you need can be found on the Getting Started page of the Silverlight community website. The Sprawl game, that seems to kick my butt everytime, can be found in the Silverlight 1.0 Gallery, whereas the Chess and Silverlight Airlines samples can be found in the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery.