Will Steve Ballmer Speak At WWDC Keynote? 280
truthsearch writes "An analyst reports that not only will CEO Steve Jobs return to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference stage — he missed last year for medical reasons — but he will be joined there by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdrey said that Microsoft has been given seven minutes during Jobs' keynote to talk about Visual Studio 2010. Chowdrey said that a new version of the development tools software will support native applications for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS." Update: 05/27 19:17 GMT by T : As reader theappwhisperer points out, Microsoft has responded to this rumor via the company's Twitter feed with an unequivocal No.
Re:Rubbish (Score:5, Interesting)
Or Bing as default search engine for Safari ... The enemy of my enemy is my friend you know ...
Re:huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't sound like they will port it to the mac. In fact I think that would be pretty bad, the UI is just totally in apropirate. It sounds more like apple is trying to find a way to let people develop for the iPhone and the iPad (and maybe the mac as well) using a PC. This could be very useful for iPhone developers.
While I'm not sure developing mac applications on windows makes much sense, it could be very nice for setting up automated build machines in a mixed platform development environment.
Re:Bound to be a big win (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically what you said, I think its not so much about Apple Developers choosing Visual Studio, but Visual Studio developers being able to work on Apple Applications.
Re:Bound to be a big win (Score:1, Interesting)
MacOS X 10.5 added kernel-level hooks for a kext to handle CLR launching. Seeing as this is WWDC, not some random consumer-level show, I'd bet Apple has finally decided to integrate Mono (or possibly a direct port of .Net) into MacOS X 10.7, and they're getting Microsoft to show off VS2010 for the Mac (since VS2010 is substantially rewritten in WPF/WCF/W-some-other-.Net-library-that-replaces-Win32-cruft). If there is a Mac edition of VS2010, it will support VB, C#, F#, ASP.NET, and DLR support. Maybe the SQL Server client stuff too. But you can bet your left nut that C++ isn't going to happen. Also, Cassini won't happen, as it would require partially porting IIS to the Mac. (Cassini is the built-in VS web server that runs locally when you're developing ASP.NET sites without IIS.)
Apple would go along with this because it gives them one more way to lock down the iPhone development landscape (everything must be .Net!) while allowing a Flash-alike (Silverlight), but not actually allowing Flash (thank god).
Microsoft would benefit by indoctrinating that many more programmers with .Net and the VS tools. (Only a fate worse than death if you're a Lunix fanboi.)
Re:I didn't find Xcode in any way deficient (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's Carbon APIs are by comparison at least 9 years old when Apple moved from System 9 to OS X around 2001. However if you count legacy, Cocoa is based on NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP which go back to the 1980s. The deprecated Classic API goes back to System OS which also goes back to the 1980s as well.
The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple went through the APIs during the transition and cleaned them up. I remember reading somewhere that they reduced the number of APIs from 8,000 to 2,000. Apple having been written off by many back then had fewer developers to migrate. MS code has a lot of legacy and with iteration, it gets harder for MS to remove legacy parts and so the code bloat continues.