So the #ukpdc10 event has come to a close. While developers attending the event in the US get yet more content to enjoy, over on the east of the Atlantic we’re calling it a night. But what a brilliant event it has been!

First of all thanks must go out to the UK team for putting together the event, and dealing with so many geeks in the same very small space for so long! I know I have had a great time and I’m sure many other people have come away enlightened and enthused as a result.

I tried to get to a variety of the sessions on offer (while keeping up with the others via Twitter and Google Reader on the iPad) so as I was in the Framework & Tools talk on C# 5 earlier, after I had played with Kinect (watch out for some more content on that coming up soon) in the break and then dropped by the Windows Phone 7 session on top tips for building Windows Phone 7 apps.

So we’re half way through PDC 2010, Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference. While the US are off having their lunch between sessions, it’s a great opportunity to sit back and take in what has been unleashed upon us in the last few hours.

Unfortunately due to this pesky University thing I managed to miss most of the main keynote, but the general overview of it was that it’s all about the web. Once again, IE 9 was headlining with some rather spectacular numbers for downloads of its Beta. There has also been another Platform Preview released for developers wanting the bleeding edge to get their hands on.

There are some innovative features in IE 9 that I had previously been extremely excited about. These are mostly regarding the browser’s integration with the operating system (especially Windows 7), which is something that Microsoft is in a unique position to provide in an efficient manner.

Some of these features are enabled through a JavaScript interface window.external. While this was all well and good, I previously had concerns with this as I had not been made aware of a method of detecting whether or not the features were available in the browser the page was being rendered by. This clearly would cause problems on multiple browsers, and you can’t just go around executing scripts for a single browser as this will cause errors in all the others. There is, however, a section on the MSDN documentation for this browser feature which describes how to perform a test to see if the browser supports the Pinned Sites feature.

The more serious issue I had was with the descriptions for various Pinned Sites features which required the use of Meta tags with extremely long property names to describe to the browser the various images, URLs and options the developer wanted. My point was that there are other technologies available in the HTML 5 specification which would be more suited to this, such as the HTML manifest (which is already used to specify options for sites such as client-side file caching, storage and other bits and pieces). According to the team, they decided to use the meta tags as it would be error-free cross browser, and it is not unstable like they claim the manifest specification is which may risk breaking the feature if the spec changes.

Many thanks to my friend Giorgio from the IE 9 team who was able to clear up these issues and provide the Microsoft team’s perspective on them.

Today’s #uktechdays coverage is sponsored by Mobile Phone Checker, helping you find the best mobile phone contract deals online.

I had high hopes for IE 9.

In fact, I was quite looking forward to it. The Platform Previews worked very well, and I was pleased that HTML 5 was finally at the forefront of the platform. Hardware acceleration was nice, the video situation wasn’t great but I was prepared to let it slide, and everything seemed to be going better than expected.

Then the Beta landed. The user interface was something unexpected! Nice minimalist header, single box at the top, not too many buttons and some really nice features integrated with Windows 7. Now you could set up jump lists, make it so a tab can be pinned to the taskbar, and customise the theme of the browser when that pinned link is opened. You can tie in to Jump Lists; add custom buttons to the previews that popup from the taskbar; and a few other nifty little features.

But that’s where the cool stops. Because despite Microsoft finally jumping on the standards bandwagon, providing standard APIs and implementations we might be able to rely on, I was then shown the code which performs all of the “cool” functionality I mentioned earlier. Abused Meta tags. Proprietary JavaScript APIs. Recommendations for using non-standard icon sizes.

It seems all of this stuff has been implemented in the most hacky way possible. Which is a nightmare. Out goes cross-browser compliance, out goes standard JavaScript APIs – Microsoft have invented their own little language extension and are going to force it on everybody. It reminds me of the “OpenXML format is 100% free and open”, “So what does this tag contain, which is defined in the spec as ‘Contains a blob of binary data used for rendering a OneNote snippet’ with no more information” debate when Office 2007 and OpenXML all happened.

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Archive;action-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk/archive.aspx;icon-uri=http://www.thewayithink.co.uk//themes/arthemia/images/favicon.ico" />

That is just not on.

So my hope would have been that Microsoft used something more sensible, for example the HTML 5 Application Manifest for which this kind of thing was designed rather than the archaic and frankly incorrect abuse of Meta tags. I am also yet to see mention of a way to detect whether the browser supports the JavaScript calls (which are also disgustingly named) or not. Mmm, compliant. Not.

Today’s #uktechdays coverage is sponsored by Mobile Phone Checker, helping you find the best mobile phone contract deals online.

This morning Steve Ballmer kicked off the UK Tech Days special event with a keynote address. He started off by saying he wanted to talk about some special opportunities and exciting products and services. While Ballmer’s presentations are notoriously hard to follow, he made some excellent points and I can now see Microsoft’s product strategy for the past 12 and coming 12 months making a lot more sense.

You’re developers – my favourite people. Ballmer

Ballmer mentioned that initially it was expected that mobile device and cloud interaction would take the form of “stupid” mobile devices acting like thin clients to the cloud. But consumers demanded more and more powerful mobile devices, and we got to where we are approaching today – ridiculously powerful devices (1GHz+ processors, 256MB+ RAM, 32GB+ storage) with always-on connections to the cloud.

People want more intelligent clients, but tied to the power of the cloud. This is the idea behind IE9. Ballmer

Where before we had Software + Services, we now have Cloud + Devices. To Ballmer, this also extends to IE9. Where Cloud Services are there to enhance the experience on mobile devices, IE 9 is a portal to web applications to enhance the desktop. This is evidenced by the tight integration between IE9 and Windows 7 (more on that later).

We learnt a lot about the cloud when writing Bing. We have hundreds of thousands of servers behind it. We want to let you use those tools. Ballmer

The usual Ballmer keynote features were in there. The shouting (“I LOVE PHONES” and “Developers! Developers! Developers!”‘ less catchy cousin “SharePoint! SharePoint! SharePoint”), Google bashing (“Unlike Google, if you write an app for Windows Phone 7, it will work on all Windows Phone 7 phones”) and so on. We also managed to get some awkward questions in – @serialseb asked why Microsoft essentially continuously screws over the open-source .NET community by creating then open-sourcing competitors to existing projects (Answer: “Is that a question?”. In his defence he did write it down immediately). I also asked what Microsoft had been doing to work with other browser vendors to ensure a great HTML 5 development experience cross-browser for web devs, to which he replied that they had been working mostly with the W3C, and then recalled Microsoft’s contributions to tests for HTML 5 browsers.

I came away from Ballmer’s presentation actually quite impressed. His enthusiasm, commitment and vision have never been doubted. But I was extremely impressed by the accuracy, competence and general deep understanding he displayed when asked questions on a wide variety of subjects. From mine on the development of IE 9 to Sebastian’s about open-souce policy, right through to a BPOS question and Xbox Live discussions, his answers were always concise, to the point, and entirely accurate.