The Apple-following portion of the Internet blew up earlier today when an analyst floated the rumor that part of Steve Jobs’ keynote would be set aside for Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer. Eric Savitz with Barron’s Tech Trader Daily:

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is Section 3.3.1, the provision in the iPhone OS SDK License Agreement that forbids cross-compilers to be used when building iPhone apps. Here’s the exact wording:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

As things played out in April after that discussion, it became clear Apple had Adobe’s “Flash-to-iPhone” technology in mind.

The rumor that Apple and Microsoft were going to be announcing that Visual Studio would be retooled for developers to build iPhone OS applications seems to be a pretty clear violation of Section 3.3.1.

Section 3.3.1 aside, what would Apple gain by allowing Visual Studio to be used to build iPhone apps? As it stands today, the only way to build and compile iPhone apps is using Apple’s Xcode, which only runs on OS X. Thus, iPhone developers are tied to the Mac platform. Why would Apple want to change that? Why split resources into more than one development tool?

Of course, all of this is Visual Studio/WWDC talk may be pointless, as Microsoft announced this afternoon that Ballmer would not be at WWDC:

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

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Microsoft won’t be present in some way or another. There is always the possibility Apple will announce they are partnering with Bing for map and search services.

Replacing Google services with Microsoft’s seems more likely that adding Visual Studio to the Xcode family. Thankfully, we don’t have long to wait.