The PDC has been the epicenter of Microsoft’s biggest platform announcements and is always of interest to the Web development community and website hosting enthusiasts.

The latest installment of the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference was recently held at the Los Angeles Convention Center and drew thousands of Microsoft Developers and vendors to the event. Microsoft describes the PDC on its website as: ”The definitive developer event focused on the technical strategy of the Microsoft developer platform. If you’re a developer, architect or technology leader involved in making strategic technology decisions for your company or organization, the PDC is for you. Since 1991, the PDC has been the epicenter of Microsoft’s biggest platform announcements, including Microsoft .NET, Windows® XP, Windows Vista® and Windows 7®. This year, you’ll hear more details about our services platform, Windows®, the Web, devices, and our next generation of developer tools.”

I had a chance to walk around the event courtesy of a fact finding mission for UK budget hosting company 34SP.com, and got a good sense of the conference proceedings through discussions with attendees and vendors. The biggest buzz at this year’s show was the fact that Microsoft gave every single paid attendee a laptop computer for free. Not only that - it was a touchscreen laptop / tablet computer pre-configured with Windows 7. For fun I searched on Twitter to get the latest comments on it. CNET has some photos of it too - it looks pretty sweet for a free giveaway.

Despite the fact that Windows 7 took a bunch of flack for it’s hokey launch video encouraging people to throw parties for the launch of Windows 7, the product has been generally well received and also praised by many computer journalists.

Additionally, in an announcement related to the PDC show the Official Microsoft hosting blog listed three hosting companies as having brought hosting products to market based on the Windows Azure platform - another strong theme behind this year’s conference. The three hosting providers are: ”GoGrid which wanted to extend its services and enable its customers to develop, test, deploy, and back-up Windows Azure platform applications efficiently and cost-effectively. GoGrid partnered with Blue Star Infotech to develop a suite of tools that help customers seamlessly build and deploy applications for the Windows Azure platform. T-Systems: the integration subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom in EMEA is building out a solution with Windows Azure and Silverlight that gives customers centralized web access to critical business information from devices connected anywhere on the DT network. And Norwegian web host Mamut is using Windows Azure Storage Services and SQL Azure Database to provide highly scalable, always-available offsite backup, storage and retrieval of critical business systems data.”

The Professional Developer’s Conference of course attracts those developers who are using Microsoft as their primary development platform, but the event is also a magnet for hosting companies who provide Microsoft-based hosting products as well. I caught up with a two web hosting professionals who were attending the conference to get their thoughts on the show. Here is what they had to say.