I attended MSDN Seminar 2011 in Hong Kong last night. Around 100 IT guys attended the seminar; Microsoft had 3 speakers to speak in the event.

The seminar covered the following highlights:

• Internet Explorer 9
  - Ryan from Microsoft emphasized the support & performance of IE9 on HTML5
  - Side-by-side compare IE9 and Google Chrome in Fish Bowl HTML5 benchmark in Internet Explorer Test Drive
  - Pin site function
  - Use Profiling tool in F12 Development Tool to diagnose which scripts spend resources most
• WebMatrix – the free web development tool for Windows
  - Can be downloaded from official website
  - Finally released its RTM version
  - Ryan shows its easiness to use
• Microsoft Surface 2.0
  - SDK is not ready yet ( will be ready in summer 2011 )
  - Introduced the specifications, e.g. 50-point multi-touch, recognition of MS  Tag, PixelSense, gesture detection with Vision System, etc.
  - future apps can be written in WPF + XNA + Silverlight
• Kinect SDK updates
  - Kinect SDK will soon be launched
  - Highlighted Skeletal Tracking , and advanced audio capabilities such as voice recognition, position detection with 4-microphone array & beam formation
• UI Coded Test in Visual Studio 2010
  - UI Coded Test can help web developers to learn which components use resource most
• Next version of Windows Phone 7 Mango
  - Faster ( memory optimization )
  - Multitasking
  - Fast application resume user experience ( Application Resume UX )
  - Background notification ( e.g. alarm , reminders , etc )
  - Background transfer service ( <20MB uses 3G , >= 20MB uses Wi-Fi )
  - Background music ( HTML5 audio elements will bind with Zune to play music in background )
  - Support of accelerometer , gyroscope & compass
  - Support of PhotoCamera API and Silverlight 4 WebCam API in SDK
  - 16 more languages support
  - Will be released at the end of 2011
• Release of free Microsoft Marketplace Tokens

Last , the event does not mention anything about Microsoft Azure .