The 2009 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is less than a couple months away, and the team is starting to create content and demos for the event. The team has been working with PDC event management over the last couple months to secure sessions and space at the event; and I wanted to share with you how the event is shaping up, as well as make a plug for our sessions.
The event will deliver a lot of really great material, as well as provide you with access to folks who are writing the code. We hope you can make it down to Los Angeles in November for the event.
PDC Sessions Of Note
So far, four sessions are currently live on the PDC event website:
- What’s New for Windows Communication Foundation 4 (Ed Pinto)
- Windows Workflow Foundation 4 from the Inside Out (Bob Schmidt)
- Spice up your applications with WF 4 (Matt Winkler)
- Workflow Services and ’Dublin’ (Mark Fussell)
In addition to the sessions being done by the team, WCF comes up in several other sessions of note at the event:
- Accelerating Applications Using Windows HPC Server 2008
- Networking and Web Services in Silverlight
- It’s All About the Services: Developing Custom Applications for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Using Microsoft ASP.NET, WCF, and REST (Maxim Lukiyanov)
- Using ADO.NET Data Services (Pablo Castro)
- Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer (Don Box, Chris Anderson)
We are working very hard to not present the same content as last year.
For WF, we’re building upon last year’s introductions to WF4 to expose more of the underlying architecture of the new WF runtime, really giving you a view into how different the new runtime isand demonstrating how workflow services work in the new Windows Application Server technology (codename ’Dublin’).
For WCF, we heard you loud and clear that there wasn’t enough WCF content. This year, we have a session focusing on the WCF enhancements coming in .NET 4, in addition to the sessions covering how WCF is used with HPC Server, Silverlight, and covering advances in ADO.NET Data Services (which is built upon WCF).
And, last but not least, last year’s PDC introduced the technology called ’Dublin’ – and it’s been a hot topic for customers ever since PDC. This year, we dive deeper into how ’Dublin’ lights up WCF and WF applications and where we’re going with the technology.
We have a few more excellent sessions in the pipeline covering technology futures; and I’ll post the updated list up here when the next batch of sessions goes live.
On the Floor of the Event
Beyond sessions, speakers and other team members will be at the event in the lounge area for Framework and Tools, both to hang out and chat with you about the technologies, as well as working a couple booths in the lounge area to show the technologies in action.
Anyone attending PDC is encouraged to stop down to the lounge and say hello. Bring your questions or just share your thoughts on the technologies; we truly love meeting our customers – and your comments and questions do have direct impact on the shape of the future platform. If there’s someone in particular you would like to connect with, let me know – I’m happy to share folks’ lounge schedules as we come up on the event and schedules are finalizedjust let me know who you’re looking to connect with or a particular topic you want to drill down on.
We are currently working on getting a small 20-seat chalk-talk area in the lounge area again this year to do smaller, more niche discussions. We’ll post more on that topic here in the coming weeks, as well, as we make progress on that front.
Pre-PDC Workshops
And, lastly, it’s worth noting that Michele Leroux Bustamante will be running a pre-PDC workshop covering the Microsoft Technology Roadmap, helping workshop attendees understand how the many technologies that make up the .NET Framework fit together – from A-W (Azure to Azure). ^_^
There is also a FREE Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp pre-PDC workshop that is open to anyone (whether attending PDC or not) as long as there is room.
Not registered? There’s still room!
There’s still room at the event, and I hear they have a $300 discount for folks registering before October 13 (and there’s also a significant discount for students and employees of academic institutions). And there is still plenty of hotel availability around the convention center as of a couple weeks ago (when I registered). A couple of the closest hotels were full, but there are still plenty of quality ones about.