Well I spent most of the day working on some peculiar problems with PICK. Then left to take my girlfriend out for her birthday. Just now catching up on whats gone on today at PDC. Man it seems like it was a huge day.

First off Windows Azure and the new .NET Services. From what I've read so far I can see some compelling uses for the .NET services and sharing content, id's and roles around the web.

The big one that I haven't seen much press on yet is C# 4.0. Looks like we are getting dynamic binding in the language. While this loses compile type safety it gives C# good ground against things like Ruby and PHP.

Named, Optional and Default parameters. Oh how I've been waiting for these since switching to .NET from PHP. I used to take advantage of these features all the time. It annoys me when I can use them in Attributes in C# but not on actual methods. I'm going to love this.

VS2010 and C# will CTP are available in a virtual PC here

Here's a better overview stolen from http://blogs.msdn.com/samng/archive/2008/10/28/microsoft-visual-studio-2010.aspx

1. Dynamic binding. We've introduced a new type, dynamic, which behaves much like object, but allows the operations performed on your object to be bound at runtime instead of compile time.
2. Named and Optional parameters. You can now specify default values for your parameters, allowing them to be optionally specified at the call site. We've also added the ability for your arguments to be passed by name, so that you can specify exactly which arguments you want to give, and refrain from specifying the rest (assuming they're optional).
3. Com interop features. We've done quite a bit of work to improve COM interop. These include:
• No ref for COM calls. For all COM calls that take ref arguments, you can specify an argument without a ref, and the compiler will generate a local for you and generate a ref to that local as the argument.
• No PIA. We have introduced the ability to deploy your applications which use Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) without referencing the actual PIA at runtime. This allows compiling against them, but not needing to ship them with your application.
• Implicit dynamic for COM types. We now give you the option of turning all objects returned from COM into dynamics so that you can perform late bound calls off of them instead of having to cast the result in order to make it useful.