PDC09 Random’ness
Well I’m back from PDC09 and just about to jump stomach first into Thanksgiving. Travel + Holidays = not good juice for writing articles. But I do have some more coming down the pipeline and I wanted to at least post my favorite sessions, just in case anyone was interested.
First, if you company doesn’t send developers to at least one conference, and at least one person to PDC, your missing out. It’s one thing to sit down as watch a webcast of the sessions, and complete different to be in the session, asking questions and talking with other developers. Oh yea and the swag can be great too!
PDC, and other conferences also allow you to connect with your vendors, which can be a good as well. I talked with HP, Intel, RedGate, Data Dynamics (GrapeCity) and JetBrains at PDC and had a chance to ask release date’s, gripe a bit and see what else they are doing.
Pretty much all of my sessions were good, I think I only had 1 or 2 bad ones. My one complaint is there shouldn’t be any dense PPT presentations at PDC, we need to see examples, code or demos. Some of the ‘just talking’ sessions, like the Microsoft Panel on the Future of Programming, was just amazing.
Erik Meijer, Don Box and Luca Bolognese are still some of my favorite presenters and I got to see them at PDC. I also loved listening to Anders Hejlsberg at PDC08, so it was a shame he wasn’t at PDC09. Great PDC this year, lots of performance, parallelism, WCF/WPF/Silverlight, cloud/grid computing and Windows7 talks.
I also tip my hat to RedGate, it’s an amazing company and I’m looking forward to the next version of {SmartAssembly} and Ants!
Here are some of my favorite PDC09 sessions.
Garbage Collection (Past, Present and Future) [FT51]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT51
Future Directions for C# (One of my favorite presenters) [FT11]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT11?type=wmv
Microsoft Panel on Future of Programming [FT52]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT52
GPU Computing in .Net (DirectCompute) [CL03]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/P09-16
WCF RIA Services [CL07]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/CL07
HPC Server [SVR01]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/P09-01
AppFabric Caching [FT26]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT26
PLINQ (GREAT Samples) [FT21]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT21
DryadLINQ [SVR17]: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVR17
