Microsoft has opened registration for its 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) (http://www.microsoftpdc.com), to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center November 17-19^th.  This follows the PDC that the company had October of last year.

The interesting thing about the PDC is that Microsoft doesn’t have one every year.  Rather, this is a conference where Microsoft waits until it believes it has something to talk about from a developer standpoint before hosting the conference.  In the past, the company has used the PDC as a vehicle for preparing developers for new and groundbreaking development technologies or platforms.

Further, the PDC topics focus on the future, usually 12 to 24 months in the future.  While Microsoft does not seem to be giving a lot of hints about what these future development trends may entail, there are at least a couple of sessions that look intriguing.

The biggest thing I see is a talk by Stephen Taub.  It’s entitled Manycore and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4: A Match Made in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, The Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 include new technologies for expressing, debugging, and tuning parallelism in managed applications.

Another featured session, given by Steve Marx, is Building Applications for the Windows Azure Platform.  Last year, Azure was just so much smoke and mirrors.  A year later, hopefully there is some more here for developers to sink their teeth into.