Techie.notepad

Why the PDC is special and the things I won't miss while there

A while back I happily announced that I will be going! See you at the PDC 2008! I've also blinged my blog properly http://blog.noop.se. Now the time has come to begin building up my own expectations about PDC and to share my sentiments about this great event!

But first a recap: Our company (Dotway) went 14 people to PDC 2005 and it was really cool! After my girlfriend at the time came over to California and we drove around (a big drive through San Diego, Tijuana, Rosarito (Mx), Palm Springs, Lake Havasu City, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and back to L.A.) and wound up getting married in Vegas! Yeah, Vegas, baby! So you can imagine me having special feelings for PDC.

Now what makes PDC so special? It's this:

If you can read the picture it groups sessions by level of difficulty: Introductory 3, Intermediate 4, Expert 16 and Advanced 61! THIS is what I'm talking about! Small wonder it is a cool event when all the heaviest technologies are delivered in depth! This is what makes PDC stand out where conferences are concerned!

Also I feel very much that PDC is about sharing knowledge! Very much like our own conference Øredev which takes place about a month after PDC in Europe, Sweden. Our event too is a huge happening with lots of brilliant minds coming. But this is just me quite bluntly setting PDC and Øredev in the same sentence! (There I got it... let's move on!)

What will I certainly NOT miss at PDC?

It appears I am going up in the cloud since I am heavily slated in my personal agenda for the event to enjoy Cloud Services and Live Platform talks. Also I will not miss Kim Camerons "Claims-Based Identity: A Security Model for Connected Applications". He's one of the idols I just have to see any time I go to an event. Anders Hejlsberg is another as he will be talking about "The Future of C#". Also I rarely miss Don Box; This time his topic is "Oslo": The Language. I'll also try to catch Angus Logan since he is doing such cool work running the Live Platform! There will also be a talk on "Parallel Programming for Managed Developers" which will cover ParallelFx. I'll be there too! Peter Provost will be talking about "Architecture without Big Design Up Front" including next generation Visual Studio code name "Rosario". There is a session on Touch Computing which sounds cool - That's Windows 7 by the way. Phew... I just ran out of air! Gotta take a deep breath! This post has got me all giddy!

Naturally there is a whole bunch more that I'd like to catch at PDC but then the question becomes another: How the h--- am I going to be able to run from session to session to cram all of this in? I have registered all my session preferences in My Sessions for a long time and I rely heavily on the accuracy of Mike Swansons Genetic Algorithm that builds the PDC 2008 schedule!

Cheers,

/Magnus

posted @ Friday, September 05, 2008 3:38 PM