Day 2 keynote at Microsoft PDC 2009 was quite exciting. To sum things up: Silverlight 4 went beta, IE9 features were previewed, and we got an external hard disk, nicely fitted in a tablet-pc format case. How thoughtful!

Here’s some of the novelties:

Silverlight 4 Beta

This was a good starter… It’s really incredibly feature packed! In my opinion, I think WCF can now be called obsolete as well, but no announcements on that :-) Anyway, here’s a list of new features: webcam access, multicast streaming, offline DRM and output protection, printing, clipboard support, out-of-browser and out-of-sandbox support, drag and drop, implicit styling, a HTML control, rich-text editing, breathe, ability to share assemblies with .NET 4, data binding improvements, udp multicast, REST enhancements, TCP channel support, …

Also check Tim Heuer’s blog post over at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx.

IE9

Yes, IE9 was announced. Running JavaScript lots faster, passing more of the ACID3 test (still not all), and the coolest part: Direct3D rendering of all graphic content. This was demoed and approved by the audience: everything is so muh faster and smoother!

WCF RIA Services

Check out Brad Abrams’ blog for this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/11/18/welcome-to-wcf-ria-services-beta.aspx

Basically a rename of RIA services, and converted to run on top of WCF rather than an own transport layer implementation in previous versions.

Overall: a great PDC09 day two!

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Microsoft’s “three-screen” vision for the future. There will be three screens connected to the cloud: TV, (handheld) devices and of course good old PC. This vision is driven by some key players: Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and Windows Azure. Make sure to have a look at these four if you want to play in this future.

Some announcements were made as well:

• Microsoft Codename “Dallas”, a new approach to consuming data that is publicly available
• Microsoft Pinpoint, a marketplace for applications on Windows Azure
• Windows Server AppFabric, the on-premise extension to the Azure platform
• Windows Identity Foundation, formerly known as Geneva, has gone RTW today
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta, released today
• Download SQL Server Modeling CTP, the repository part from Oslo
• Download Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure November CTP, a cool synchronization means between local, on-premise data and data in SQL Azure. Yummy!

Had a great day yesterday, driving trough the city of Los Angeles and looking at various places in town. Conference day one was also very interesting, lots of good sessions. Currently missing a session slot though, waiting for a Channel9 interview on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. Stay tuned!