VB and C# together share about 50% of the “garbage-collected languages” market. How do Microsoft design these languages? Where do they get ideas? How do they incorporate new paradigms without breaking the existing languages? Where will they go in the future and how will we get there?

Stephen Walther from the ASP.NET Team joins James Senior to discuss an announcement: Microsoft is about to make the first contributions to the jQuery open source project! In the past 6 months, we’ve been busy working on three features: Templating, Data-Linking and Globalization. This video show demos of the contributions in action and how/when they will be available for developers to use.

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Explore the latest Windows Server release via a quick-paced demo-oriented survey of features with a focus on performance, Web, management, and other server solution scenarios. Learn about developing applications for “many-core” scale, using efficient “trigger-started” services, integrate solutions with the File Classification Infrastructure, and designing Web Platform extensions.

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Scott Guthrie discusses Microsoft’s relationship with Agile. Learn what Microsoft is doing to enable developers to adopt an agile strategy.

Microsoft has delivered multiple technologies that focus on interoperability with non-Microsoft and Open Source technologies. In this video you will learn how to use the Eclipse tools today to build Silverlight applications that run on PCs and Macs, how to develop using combinations of Java, Ruby and PHP in addition to the standard Microsoft languages, and how Microsoft’s commitment to openness with the Azure Services Platform and the use of claims-based identity supports heterogeneous identity systems.

Microsoft’s open source forge CodePlex has just turned 3 years old and passed the auspicious milestone of 10,000 active projects (actually 11,025 at time of filming). We thought this would be a good time to sit down with Sara Ford – Agile Program Manager for CodePlex – and recap on the past three years, CodePlex’s current feature set and what’s in store for the future.

Architecting an enterprise or web application for high performance, scale, and availability can be a challenge without an appropriate caching strategy. One approach is to leverage a distributed caching platform to support the needs of performance, scale, and availability. In this ARCast episode, Scott Hanselman and Joe Shirey discuss Microsoft’s codename “Velocity” project and how it supports building out these types of applications as well as what architects and developers need to think about when implementing a distributed caching approach.

For more than thirty years, people have been learning the language of computers. It’s now time for technology to learn the language of people: touch, voice and gesture. This session will outline the design philosophy behind Microsoft’s efforts to create natural, intuitive and emotional products, and provide a glimpse into how the Surface User Experience team is working to make this vision a reality.

ALT.NET represents a community of thought leaders with a call to action of improving the status quo of how software is developed in the Microsoft developer ecosystem. ALT.NET encourages very strict adherence to agile practices such as BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and tools that map to those practices fairly closely. The result is that they have historically recommend open-source solutions such as NHibernate, Structure Map and Castle’s Monorail over Microsoft’s platform solutions. How has Microsoft responded at this crossroads? The answer has been is to become part of the community …

Do you need to understand how to extend your applications and services to embedded devices using Windows 7 technologies? See the new Windows Embedded roadmap and hear plans for our next-generation offering built on Windows 7 technologies.
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC56/