Microsoft Meltdown 2005 Details Announced

Microsoft is planning to celebrate ten years of DirectX at a special version of the annual Meltdown event in Seattle. The event will take place on July 26th and 27th, and will feature presentations from various industry and Microsoft experts. The focus of the event, beyond the DirectX birthday celebrations, will be the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development system and the changes to DirectX that will brought about by the next generation Windows operating system, currently codenamed Longhorn. A business/publisher track will, by popular demand, also return as part of the event. One of the keynote addresses will be given by Mike Morhaime of Blizzard Entertainment, and, aside from a number of notable technical talks, other major business-related roundtables include one on cross-platform business models, featuring BioWare's Greg Zeschuk, Valve's Gabe Newell, Epic's Mark Rein, EA's Neil Young, Sony Online Entertainment's John Smedley, and Junction Point Studios' Warren Spector, as well as talks on casual gaming, community generated content, the art of the business deal, and more. Early-bird registration for Meltdown 2005 ends soon, with further information being available at the official Microsoft Meltdown 2005 website.