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Microsoft is holding its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its Redmond, WA campus this week. The event kicks off with a two-hour keynote hosted by the company's CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, Microsoft's president of its server and tools division. Microsoft generally holds these events when it wants to tell its developer community about major platform developments, so we expect to hear a lot about Microsoft's new mobile platform Windows Phone 7 and its cloud computing initiatives. We have also heard some rumors that we could hear something about Windows 8 today.

The keynote is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Pacific/12 p.m. Eastern and you will be able to see our play-by-play account of the event right here, or head over to the conference website for the live video stream.

We're going to the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this morning. It starts at 9 a.m. PST. We have some things in store to give a perspective on the event and the strategy behind Windows Azure.

Our own Frederic Lardinois will be live blogging the keynotes. I will be snapping pictures to capture a sense of the event.

After the keynote, I will do a live, streaming interview with Bob Muglia, who oversees Windows Azure. Muglia reports to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Earlier this year, Muglia filled the role previously held by Ray Ozzie, a key player in crafting the strategy for Microsoft's cloud initiative. The interview begins at 1:20 p.m. PST.

Next week (October 28 and 29) Microsoft will host its Professional Developer Conference (PDC) on its sprawling Redmond, WA campus. Typically, PDC - which the company only organizes when it wants to talk about major platform developments - is held at a larger venue, but Microsoft decided to hold it on its own campus this year. While this makes for a more intimate setting, it also means that fewer developers will be able to attend in person. To make up for this, Microsoft is putting the technology it developed for streaming live video from live events like the Vancouver Olympics and NBC Sunday Night Football to use in covering its own developer conference.

Microsoft just announced that it started work on Internet Explorer 9 three weeks ago. Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, showed an early build of IE9 during his PDC keynote today. In this presentation, Sinofsky announced that Microsoft will focus on support for new standards like HTML5 and CSS3, as well as developing a faster JavaScript rendering engine. Sinofsky candidly acknowledged that IE8 did not do well on the Acid3 test, though this early build of IE9 only scored a few points higher than IE8 (24 vs. 32).

When you launch a make or break initiative like Windows Azure, you better get it right.

Well, from our vantage point, Microsoft got it right. How? In front of a sea of developers at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft trotted out a group of geek all-stars who showed how they are using Azure to do some pretty cool stuff.

Ray Ozzie opened the Microsoft PDC '08 this morning with a keynote speech. In it he announced Windows Azure, Microsoft's "Windows in the cloud". It is a new service based operating environment. He described it as a massive highly scalable service platform. What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become. It will be Microsoft's highest scalable system enabling people and companies to create services on the Web.