It must be hard to be a developer and not having heard about the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Yesterday and today were amazing and a lot of interesting stuff was announced and demonstrated:

Windows Azure - the operating system in the cloud. I like the links Steve Clayton has gathered http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/10/28/an-azure-grab-bag.aspx

Live Mesh - a part of live services that can be used to store data and contacts in the cloud and to share them amongst your devices. https://developer.mesh-ctp.com/Welcome/default.aspx

Office Web Applications - Your favorite application web-enabled http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2008/10/28/office-web-applications.aspx

And lots of more stuff like mounting .vhd files in Windows 7, creating great reports in VSTS2010, creating textual DSLs in Oslo, etc. If I would have to summarize it, it would be the photo below which I took during yesterday's keynote. This image underlines the Microsoft message of Software + Services again: You can choose whether you want your app (or parts of it) in the cloud or not.