Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference is traditionally where it shows developers its forward plans. Sometimes these do not work out as expected. Notorious examples include Hailstorm web services, and pre-reset Vista, in which Windows Presentation Foundation was more at the core, and which included the WinFS smart file system.

It follows that the just published session list for the PDC should not be treated as an infallible guide to the future. Still, there are interesting snippets here:

• .NET and ASP.NET for Windows Server Core
• Silverlight for Mobile devices
• Touch computing in Windows 7
• A “new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code”
• and of course the Live Mesh developer platform