As usual, I find Ray Ozzie's keynotes inspiring and optimistic about where software and services are headed. PDC09 was no different. The central theme in the presentation was that of three screens (desktop, phone and TV) and the cloud, and how these come together to offer seamless integration and convergence of technologies for the consumer.
For a developer, what Microsoft brings is a consistent experience developing for this broad platform with Azure on the back-end, Windows, Internet Explorer and Silverlight on the front-end, .NET, Visual Studio and Expression as the framework and tooling.
There were some very cool demos. The new Silverlight-based Seesmic Twitter client seemed refeshingly different, and promises to become a developer platform in itself. The OData-based access to public data, turning data into services has the potential to democratize data and serve as a catalyst for innovation.
All that is cool! However to me the real takeaway, was what came at the very end. We're seeing the early days of cloud computing, and that it is time to dream, and dream big, and that developers play a key role in unlocking the potential, and turning that into applications, services, and solutions.
Posted on Tuesday, 11/17/2009 @ 11:15 AM