Given the general gushing on the PDC blogs, I was going to restrict my comments on my first day experience of PDC to my blog, but after speaking to a couple of Channel 9'ers who both feel the same way I do I thought it might be worth starting a discussion here to see how representative our opinions are.
To put it briefly, I'm VERY disappointed. I thought PDC was aimed at the Professional Developer community with "leading edge" content direct from the developers who'd put it together, and exclusives that wouldn't be available elsewhere to anyone who wanted
them.
The pre-con hype did nothing to disabuse me of this notion, with all the talk of 30GB exclusive software, no marketing fluff etc...
Let's start with that 30GB of software....
It comes in a very pretty luxury package. Well done marketing! But what do we actually get?
Disk 1: Vista Beta 1 (already available to MSDN subscribers for several weeks, and if you don't already subscribe to MSDN should you really be attending PDC?)
.
Disk 2: VS2005 Team System Beta 2 (freely available to anyone who's wanted it for several months and featuring code that was closed back in February)
Disk 3: SQL Server 2005 June CTP (I downloaded the SEPTEMBER CTP last night and had a free copy of the June CTP and an associated DVD resource kit - not included here - that was available to anybody who registered for free on a Microsoft SQL Server web site
a few weeks ago)
Disk 4: WinFX and other stuff (OK I haven't checked out the other stuff but I suspect I already have everything on this disk, and had it for quite a while before I came to PDC)
Disk 5: Vista PDC Build - at last something new! Except that every presenter questioned has admitted that the version of Vista they're demoing (with the sidebar etc) isn't the build we're getting which, by all accounts, isn't that different from the beta 1
issued a few weeks back
Disk 6: empty slot. Yup, there is no Office 12 Beta 1 included in the set.
Robert's been hyping up Office 12. There's a huge number of sessions on Office 12 at PDC, and it was the most interesting thing at the keynote, but guess what - attendees aren't getting a copy! What the hell is the point of that?! If you can't give a copy to those developers who've put their money where their mouths are by taking a week out and spending a small fortune on attending your only two-yearly conference aimed at developers, who are you giving it to?
So in summary that 30GB of exclusive exciting software appears to have a slightly more recent cut of Vista code than has been available up to now and not much else.
There's other new software: Atlas and Max and that other stuff on the web of course, but those not attending PDC got their hands on it first, and it only works on the Beta 2 VS that was cut back in February!!!
OK, enough whining about the over-hyped "The Goods" let's look at the session content:
Keynote: nearly four hours without a break is ridiculous.
Bill Gates spent an hour giving the same presentation I've heard multiple times in the past. Lots of words. No real content at all.
Jim Allchin seemed desperate to repeat the words "cool" or "very cool" as if he could convince us that a lot of what we were seeing hadn't been on the Apple platform for several months now. It came across as rather lame.
The highlight by far of the keynote was Don Box and his volunteers putting together a good demo of Indigo, Avalon, ATLAS and a few other bits and pieces. But because they were running so late it was really rushed. This should have been the main part of the
keynote at an event aimed exclusively at developers - not Bill repeating the same guff about "digital experience", "the most exciting time" etc that he's been repeating over the last 10 years.
The over-running keynote meant that the first sessions had to be completely abandoned. And that was after Allchin confessed he'd had to cut a lot of stuff out. Had anybody rehearsed this thing for the timeslot available?
On to the sessions I attended:
"Lighting up your applications in 2005" was a humorous talk, but had very little content and didn't match the original description at all (which was meant to be all about lighting up Vista). It's not that hard to take the mickey out of Microsoft's print dialogue
and error messages, but that was really the only real content of this presentation (along with some explanation of the "great" UI design in Max, which fell rather flat when someone asked "What about accessibility or those who don't have a mouse?")
The comparison between the different presentation technologies WAS a good talk, but I thought the hype was pretty much demolished with the question at the end "What does this give me that Flash doesn't already give me today?"
The IE7 talk was basically the introductory "high level" white-paper to beta 1 that's been on MSDN for weeks, presented as slides. Very high-level and surely any half-decent web developer should already be well up-to-speed on this stuff.
In short, I learnt nothing new today. Honestly, you'd learn more from watching the Channel 9 videos on the same subjects than from attending these presentations (the reason I skipped the "Lap around IIS 7" presentation which would have been my first choice was because it was hard to see how anything could be added to what had already been covered in the IIS 7 video that went up last week).
Now I appreciate that maybe Channel 9ers are more conscientious about keeping up to date with recent announcements and beta's, and clearly there are developers here, gushing over IE7 beta 1 features and demo's of XAML, that are getting a lot more out of
this conference than the few Channel 9'ers I've spoken to, but it begs the question "What exactly is a PROFESSIONAL developer?". I regard myself as an extremely average developer and had expected to find the content here too complex at times or over my head.
Instead I've found it very dumbed down, as have the other Channel 9'ers I've spoken to (admittedly only two)
Then there's the "JASJAR PDA/Phone for $149" fiasco. There are rumoured to be close to 7000 developers here. The "limited number" of JASJAR devices is rumoured to be just 250! No wonder it was "sold out" more than an hour before the keynote in which the offer
was announced had even finished. What's the point? And why publicise it during a keynote such that only those who got up and left were able to take advantage of the offer? What a crazy thing to do!
I'm hoping I've just been unlucky in the sessions I've attended and that presentations will move from the "marketing high level view" to a more developer-focussed view over the next few days. Otherwise it would have been a FAR better use of my time (and money) to have sat at home just downloading the few new bits and learning them in the evenings. The only real unique advantage I can see from PDC at the moment is networking, and to be honest I can do a lot of that through my local user groups back home in London.
Other comments please, preferably from those attending PDC rather than those who think they know what it's like.
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