Professional Developers Conference

Events

• July 1992 - Moscone Center in San Francisco, California
• * Known as Win32 Professional Developers Conference
• * First demonstration of the Win32 API and first mention of "Chicago", which would eventually become Windows 95
• * Estimated attendance of over 5,000 developers
• * Windows NT 3.1 Preliminary Release for Developers was sent to all conference attendees
• December 1993 - Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California
• * Windows "Chicago"
• * Win32 and Object Linking and Embedding version 2
• * Estimated attendance of over 8,000
• * Cairo public demonstration, including the Object File System
• March 1996 - Moscone Center in San Francisco, California
• * Microsoft demonstrated the power of new tools, renamed ActiveX
• * The ActiveX demos were impressive despite occasional technical difficulties. Microsoft and other industry leaders presented VBScript, an implementation of OLE Scripting; ActiveX Controls, for embedding OLE Controls into HTML documents; ActiveX Conferencing, which enables sharing data as well as applications over TCP/IP; the Internet Control Pack, allowing developers to make their applications Internet aware; and numerous other ActiveX technologies.
• November, 1996 - Long Beach, California November 3–7, 1996
• September 1997 - San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California
• * First demonstrations of Windows NT 5.0, release of Beta 1 to developers
• * Estimated attendance of 6,200
• October 11–15, 1998 - Colorado Convention Center, Denver, Colorado
• * Windows NT 5.0, the release of Beta 2 to developers.
• * Windows DNA technology announced, including COM+

  2000-2009

• July 11–14, 2000 - Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida
• *.NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET announced, initial beta release given to attendees
• *C# programming language announced and demonstrated
• *ASP+, the successor to Active Server Pages was announced; this was renamed ASP.NET later in the year
• *Announcement of the end of the Windows 9x line, culminating with a planned 2002 release of a new operating system, "Whistler"
• *Internet Explorer 5.5 was released
• *Estimated attendance of 6,000 developers
• October 22–26, 2001 - Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California
• *Release candidates of the.NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET were announced during Bill Gates' keynote.
• *Windows XP was officially released.
• *Introduction of Tablet PC, including a software development kit.
• *.NET My Services announced.
• *.NET Compact Framework introduced.
• *First discussions of Internet Information Services version 6.
• *The Counting Crows performed at the PDC party at the Staples Center.
• October 27–30, 2003 - Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California
• *Windows Longhorn revealed - Avalon, Aero, Indigo, WinFS
• September 13–16, 2005 - Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California
• *Windows Vista build 5219 handed out to attendees
• *Internet Explorer 7 demoed
• *Office 12 demoed with ribbon bar
• *.NET 2.0
• October 27–30, 2008 - Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California.
• *First demonstration of Windows 7 as well as Office 14 for the Web.
• *Introduction of Windows Azure, Microsoft's data center hosting platform.
• *Outlook to.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and a new.NET Application Server.
• *Release of Microsoft Surface SDK and first demonstration of SecondLight, a next generation Surface prototype.
• November 17–20, 2009 - Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California
• *Vision of Three Screens and a Cloud
• *Emergence of Windows Azure with billed, commercial service to begin in February 2010.
• *Many back-end announcements:
• **Microsoft AppFabric, based on the earlier.NET Application Server and the caching technology.
• **Microsoft SQL Server Modeling Services released
• **BizTalk Server 2009 R2 announced with new features like an improved mapper for early 2010 release
• *Many front-end announcements:
• **Release of first public betas for Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Silverlight 4
• **Early revelations about Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 and its objective of better Acid3 performance and HTML5/CSS3 compliance.
• *A special "PDC 2009" Acer 1420p Multi-touch Tablet PC was given out to all attendees
• October 28–29, 2010 - Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington
• * Announced new Platform Features for Cloud Computing
• * VmRoles announced to port existing on-premises Applications to the Cloud
• * Microsoft "Dallas" renamed to Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket
• * Windows Azure Marketplace Applications announced
• * An unlocked Windows Phone 7 smartphone was given out to all attendees
• * Microsoft limited the number of attendees to 1,000
• * Many public viewing events all over the globe

  Other Microsoft developer conferences

• Dev Connections
• Microsoft TechEd
• Mix
• PASS
• SQLBits
• VSLive!