Microsoft PDC 2010 highlights

There were a lot of announcements at the MS Professional Developer’s Conference yesterday. Some interesting facts from PDC from Twitter & a live blog -

• 10 million downloads for IE9 beta - Ballmer .. Biggest beta ever.
• 500,000 downloads of the #WP7 dev tools already - @scottgu 
• #azure has more than 200,000 subscriptions to date 
• Over 1000 apps and games already uploaded to the marketplace.
• DataMart is Windows Azure MarketPlace
• The WP7 profiling tools run in the Express edition too
• HTML5 will be 'lingua franca' for Web apps, Ballmer says
• IE9 Platform Preview 6 is now available for download.
• Muglia: "We'll make Java a first-class citizen in the cloud. We will make PHP run great on Azure - or Ruby."
• Pixar is using Windows Azure.
• Channel 9 runs on Azure
• Why did Pixar choose Azure? Scalability: render farm for rent is not a new idea, but in the cloud, you can now scale these up as you need them. Sustainability: We need to ensure that a solution we put in place will be there for a long time. It just works.
• Small instance of #Azure role should help with the lightweight apps like hosting blogs
• Recorded sessions from PDC 2009 videos. The latest ones may also come up. The recorded sessions from PDC 2010 are also available. (10/Nov)