No Steve Ballmer Appearance at WWDC Keynote [Updated]

In a tweet from Microsoft's official Twitter account, the company has denied a claim that CEO Steve Ballmer would be speaking at the keynote for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 7th.

Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI.

Ballmer had been rumored by Wall Street analyst Trip Chowdhry to be making an appearance at WWDC to announce support for iPhone OS and Mac OS X development in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010.

Chowdhry's claim, however, centers around the Visual Studio 2010 announcement, with the appearance by Ballmer to deliver the news as an apparently less-certain rumor. While Microsoft's denial regarding Ballmer leaves open the possibility that another Microsoft executive could make such an announcement during the seven-minute block reportedly set aside, the development would still certainly come as a significant surprise.

Update: Barron's reports that Chowdhry has retracted both of yesterday's claims, indicating that there will be no Microsoft announcements at WWDC. Chowdhry notes with any remaining credibility he might have, however, that his contacts "insist that both MSFT and AAPL are working on development tools - probably our timing is off".