Microsoft announced the new bits at PDC keynote today. The theme? Cloud, cloud, and more cloud. The Azure platform goes into production on Jan 1. In beta through the next several months are new cloud platform tools: AppFabric (previously code named "Dublin") and Endpoint. From what I understand AppFabric provides a unified hosting environment for WCF and Workflow, SQL Azure database caching, and can be configured right in IIS. Endpoint seems to be a discovery service for web services all over the world. You can search it and get all the information you need to consume that data in your application. It probably uses the REST protocol. Microsoft showed a pretty cool demo with the NASA web service that involved showing 3D landscapes of pictures taken by the Mars Rover. You could do a serious mashup in a .NET app with Endpoint.

The CIO of the U.S. government gave a little pep talk about cloud computing. He said the Obama Administration is committed to the cloud and is actively migrating to it now. Honestly, will Multnomah County really spend $3.5 million to build a new DC? Next year, Azure will offer totally configurable VMs in any flavor you want. We could run all of the county DC virtualized on Azure. New apps would plug right in to the cloud environment and legacy stuff could be put on configurable virtual servers in WinOS 2003, 2008, whatever.

Oh and Visual Studio 2010 with .NET Framework 4.0 will be released sometime in Q1 or Q2. The beta is out now and there was some cool stuff in it. You can drag a code pane over to your other monitor, debugging is beefed up, and unit tests write themselves at run time. Other stuff but it went pretty fast.