At this week’s Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft is set to make a slew of announcements about its product lines, and hopefully show a glimpse of some exciting new ones. One of the first gems to, um, surface is that the company is about to give a broad group of developers the ability to create applications for its Surface tabletop computer for the first time.

Everyone who attends the Surface session (later today) will apparently be able to get an exclusive email invitation for joining the Surface developer community website where the Surface SDK & Surface Simulator tool can be downloaded.

Based on an interview Seattle Tech Report did with Brad Carpenter, general manager of the Microsoft Surface team, it seems Microsoft has targeted five areas for the computer and Surface applications: entertainment, healthcare, banking, automotive, and retail.

Carpenter said that for now only 1,200 developers would be able to download the Surface’s software development kit. Earlier this month, Microsoft had already released an SDK for the “Touchless” software under an open-source license.

You can see the upcoming SDK in action in the video embedded below (kudos to Application Development):