On the PDC 2007 event updates I just saw that Microsoft called off PDC 2007 planned to take place in October 2007. Their explanation for this is a little bit weird: they say that upcoming technologies such as Orcas and Katmai will be already at developer’s hands by that time.

I understand that PDC doesn’t deal with current or soon-to-be-released technology, and frankly, I didn’t epxect to see anything about Orcas there. I find their explanation weird, especially for two points:

1. Not expecting Orcas to be as far as it is right now:
   Let’s keep aside Katmai (next version of SQL Server), but come on: Orcas is rather late than early, as Microsoft urgently needs to ship it for supporting their Office 2007 development platform properly. They even stripped features again from it (e.g. the Entity Framework which suddenly popped up, and nobody yet really knows what it will be).
2. What will happen after Orcas/Katmai?
   Doesn’t Microsoft have a strategy to present by fall, what we should expect after Orcas/Katmai which will be in late beta stage by then? What about the dynamic languages platform, how will Silverlight evolve and what about their data acess strategy they claim to have?

Let's see how quickly they announce the new date of PDC.

Posted by Chris