My week of deep-diving into the world of Microsoft and its future technologies has come to an end. What a week it has been.

The time I’ve spent getting my hands dirty with the pre-beta code for Windows 7 has been nothing short of fascinating. Although the build we were able to bring back to the IT PRO offices was slightly behind the build being demoed on-stage, it nonetheless contains all the key features and technologies being touted as reasons to upgrade once Windows 7 hits the shops.

The issue of upgrading is the critical one. Microsoft continues to talk-up Vista - we would expect nothing less - yet compared to Windows 7, Vista doesn’t quite have the wow factor. Rather, Windows 7 is already shaping up to be the operating system Microsoft wanted to release two years ago, as opposed to the one it had to eventually take to market. Visually the changes are not that significant. Beyond the reworked taskbar the visuals are much the same as the Vista UI. This is not a bad thing. The Vista UI is very slick and modern, and the underlying code of Windows 7 is already showing signs at this early stage that it will deliver the operational performance that is still missing from Vista.

It is also encouraging to see that Windows 7 lelivers most of the functionality promised initially for Vista, but which failed to make it in to the final product, such as the advanced search capabilties.

By the end of PDC, there was still plenty of buzz around Azure, the company’s biggest push into the world of cloud computing. Developers love the idea of such a significant cloud platform, backed up with colossal amounts of processing and storage power, as well as true global distributed computing centres.

However, many of the developers I spoke with at PDC remain wary of doing too much with any hosted service in beta, even when they are being given away for free (and without any guarantees) while in the beta process.

Until such time as Microsoft can put a price on the Azure service and offer at least an idea of the service level agreement it will be able to commit to when the service comes out of beta, developers will remain wary of it. Not due to any failings of the platform as such, but simply becasue many won’t want to produce a successful app this early on that depends on a cloud envronment that may go up and down like a yoyo. The sooner Microsoft can both monetise Azure and guarantee quality of service, the sooner corporate customers and mainstream developers will flock to it. The key components to make Azure a successful platform and business for Microsoft are there, all that is needed is a sign of progress and a measure of the support that developers and users can expect once it launches as a 1.0 service. Once that can be quantified, then expect Azure to become an essential component of most mainstream web services that need lots of storage or lots of processing power on-demand.

Of course, there was more to PDC than just Azure and Windows 7. We got a very early peek at the work being done on the next version of Office, which will see the user interface settle down following the move to the ‘ribbon’, as well as more collaborative working features and closer integration with Microsoft’s unified communications products.

There was also a lot going on with core developer tools, from useful tools like Oomph to major progress on the next version of Visual Studio.

In short, after a few years of being in the doldrums, Microsoft finally has some meaningful buzz around it again. The next 18 months are going to be very exciting for users and developers alike.

The announcement of Windows Azure was not much of a secret going into PDC. However, what surprised many was the volume of support that Microsoft is giving this major new project.

From data centres around the world that are three times the size of a football pitch each, to thousands of development and technical staff in place to make Azure work and eventually make it a reliable, service level-based product platform, Azure is a massive undertaking for Microsoft compared to its tip-toe steps into Software as a Service (SaaS) so far such as Windows Live.

For now, Azure is little more than a beta, and it was made very clear that the Azure service will not have any service level guarantees in place. In fact, there is no guarantee that apps you develop to run within the Azure cloud now will work on the eventual 1.0 version.

Of course, at this stage Microsoft could hardly ask users to pay for using Azure given there are no guarantees it will work 24/7, which is why it will be free during this technology preview stage. This is important, as to really understand the potential of a cloud computing platform such as Azure, you need to go and play with it - mess around with some code and see what you can do with it. Only then can you really understand the capabilities and limitations of the platform.

During the Azure demo, what was lacking was any qualified data about what Azure can deliver to customers. Microsoft has not been ‘dogfooding’ the platform, or at least isn’t admitting to it yet, and it is so new that there were few third-party examples, though our look at Dot Net Solutions gave us some insight into the benefits of utility processing.

So, the jury is out on Azure for now, but the potential is definitely there. As developers, you need to go and play with it, stress test it and challenge the infrastructure with applications that Microsoft never even considered when it began work on the Azure project.