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.

Beer28 wrote:

I knew something was up when I asked what food they were serving and somebody posted that they got chips and soda for a $2000 ticket price.

irascian wrote:

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!

As for the rest, there's also the people who don't spend that much time investigating the latest stuff on their own time, but rather have the company pay a trip for this to take place. There also seems to be plenty of 400 level sessions though it is likely that a lot of the content will be available through the net eventually as usual.

Something I have to agree definetely is the length of which Bill used to repeat the same things everyone who cares knows by now. And yes for people following Channel 9 and blogs, 4/5 of the keynote felt like repeat.

BTW. Yeah some do get the bits a lot earlier and possibly in better shape (The story is the VS RC DVD has wrong label so the setup doesn't work right away - probably corrected in the downloadable bits)

irascian wrote:

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.

Manip wrote:

irascian wrote: 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!

Teach you for not bringing in a wireless tablet PC

When you read Larry Osterman isn't going to a conference you know it is worth skipping.


Sorry about this, and I'm not trying to hijack your topic (honestly) but who did win the PDC coding competition in the end?

scobleizer wrote:

Let's meet again tomorrow and see if you think it's still not hard core enough.

Don't miss Raymond Chen.

I will bet you that by the end of the week your brain will be hurting.

scobleizer wrote:

Let's meet again tomorrow and see if you think it's still not hard core enough.

Don't miss Raymond Chen.

I will bet you that by the end of the week your brain will be hurting.

orangie wrote:

LARRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!

I sent you a email on your blog asking to explain what the heee is svchost.exe..It got sent back..hmmm

btw I'm starting C++ and I hate it already, not the language but I'm used to dragging and dropping GUI elements..The book I have only has the concepts since its a academic book for the course..

butttttttt what I really want to know is can you send me in the path where I can find out how to add buttons,listboxs etc in native C++?

orangie wrote:

LARRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!

I sent you a email on your blog asking to explain what the heee is svchost.exe..It got sent back..hmmm

btw I'm starting C++ and I hate it already, not the language but I'm used to dragging and dropping GUI elements..The book I have only has the concepts since its a academic book for the course..

butttttttt what I really want to know is can you send me in the path where I can find out how to add buttons,listboxs etc in native C++?

I'm bummed about no Office beta.  Why?  Because they gave us a little book mark thing in our main pack saying "Get the Office 12 Beta 1".  So yeah that's a bit of a bummer so far.  Still there's more to go during the week.

I actually didn't mind Bill's part of the Keynote.   As my first time seeing him in person it was cool.  Plus the Napoleon Dynamite video was a riot.

I actually had trouble focusing on the talks in the afternoon.  I was in the same first two sessions as Ian.  And I agree the descriptions were slightly misleading.  Especially the session about choosing the right platform.  It turned out to be a whole lot of overview about what the platforms are (most of which was in the keynote) and then like one slide describing when to use each technology.

The last session I saw today was the lap around XAML or whatever it was called.  It was cool to see how one of the keynote demo's was built.  BUT, without the supporting dev tools being up and running its hard to judge whether I will want to use the technology.  Sure the output is cool, but I can't tell how hard it will be to do all that stuff.

I skipped the PDC underground tonight unfortunately, so someone who was there give us a rundown.

Here's to an exciting tomorrow...  (I'm taking bets on whether tomorrow's keynote will actually be better than today's).

-Jeremy

jkwuc89 wrote:

Generally, my experience has been that the best sessions are those given by non-MS employees.

Manip wrote:

Teach you for not bringing in a wireless tablet PC  

Minh wrote:

Orbit,
Larry's not your personal tech support. The 'Net is full of C++ resources. Hunting for those resources is also a C++ skill. Learn it.

It's like when you talk to someone and they say, "Know what I mean?" like it is punctuation.  Or they begin every sentence with "Actually" or "Well..."  Or they add the word "super" every time they want to emphasize something they've said *cough* every MS person I've seen, even Bill Gates *cough*.

I went to Tech Ed last year, and, at first felt the same.  Its very disconcerting to go into sessions and be told nothing new about Group Policy, Active Directory management et al.

By Friday, when I flew back home, my head was ready to explode though.  What you have to remember is you have days and days and days of information loading, combined with a, *ahem*, little bit of partying.  The information, especially if you start doing several 300 and 400 level presentations, does pile up.  To be honest, the best I found from the presentations was found when you review them later.  I presume you'll get DVDs with the persentations on after the event?

I found it was the stuff AROUND the presentations/tracks that was really useful that week though, because you are in a pretty unique situation to take some engineers from Microsoft aside, talk with them about your situation, give feedback, work things out, that people who aren't at PDC/Tech Ed/whatever do not have.  Its kinda like a highly personalised Channel 9.  I'd recommend that whenever you ge the chance, try and grab one of the guys or gals from MS and talk techie.

I found going to Tech Ed highly worthwhile.  Mind you, Microsoft did pay for my hotel, plane ticket, conference ticket and free beer at the parties...

Cider wrote:

 

I found going to Tech Ed highly worthwhile.  Mind you, Microsoft did pay for my hotel, plane ticket, conference ticket and free beer at the parties...

Manip wrote:

Teach you for not bringing in a wireless tablet PC  

eddwo wrote:

Using the flash drive as RAM is just wierd. How the hell does that work? Flash is not nearly as fast as DRAM and it loses data after multiple write cycles. Ordinary flash drives are even slower than the hard drives usually.
Or is it just a way to store Superfetch profiles, rather than actual data.
Could someone explain that to me?

eddwo wrote:

There is also a web developer toolbar for IE6-7 in the work. It's features seem to be exactly the same as the firefox one. Except perhaps the "ruler", which looked pretty cool.

Mister DEVELOPER!

First, PDC is not a show me everything new you have game, cause I wannabe the MAN in any developer party, cause I was on PDC. No! PDC is a developer chance to hang with other developers, to make some professional connections, to network. PDC is an investment. (PERIOD). The question is how can you benefit from that investment, and if you dont know the answer, then I am afraid nobody can help you. Bill, Jim and all of the other MS guys is here to give you the positive energy, not the know-how and certainly they are not there to entertain you. So you have a very wrong attitude and you are asking the wrong question all the time. Microsoft give you the greatest tools, they make you so empowered as a developer, that nobody can come close to them, they chew your food to make your life much easier, so I cant understand people who is not satisfied with this. PDC is not a place where you came for a few DVDs, but a place where you can collect the energy for your following work and where you can see and understand a little better some future technologies, which is still heavily under development, and this is the maximum Microsoft can show you about something so new, something so work in progress like those future technologies. PDC is the place where you can truly see the big picture. So dear Mr. Developer, be happy, that you are so lucky to be on that PDC, because there are many of us very high-end developers who cant be there.

But then again you say:
I just got back from PDC05 Underground - and that was MUCH better - a really fun three hours with eight great talks from the likes of Rob Howard, Ken Spencer, Jeff Palermo and too many others whose names I didn't make a note of. Great stuff.

so it looks like you get a picture yourself. One of the lessons a man can learn is: NEVER GIVE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS AWAY because there is a great chance to be in wrong. The end of the day is much smarter than the middle

Thank you for reading this.
Andy

aludanyi wrote:

No! PDC is a developer chance to hang with other developers, to make some professional connections, to network.

aludanyi wrote:

PDC is an investment. (PERIOD).

aludanyi wrote:

Microsoft give you the greatest tools, they make you so empowered as a developer, that nobody can come close to them, they chew your food to make your life much easier, so I cant understand people who is not satisfied with this.

jsrfc58 wrote:

aludanyi wrote: No! PDC is a developer chance to hang with other developers, to make some professional connections, to network.

I thought that is what geek dinners and blogs were for.

jsrfc58 wrote:

 

aludanyi wrote: PDC is an investment. (PERIOD).

Unless you get a free trip there.

jsrfc58 wrote:

aludanyi wrote: Microsoft give you the greatest tools, they make you so empowered as a developer, that nobody can come close to them, they chew your food to make your life much easier, so I cant understand people who is not satisfied with this.

irascian wrote:

Has he used Adobe or Macromedia products? Has he used Eclipse or IBM's WebSphere? Clearly not, and yet he seems qualified to state that Microsoft give us "the greatest tools".

eddwo wrote:

Using the flash drive as RAM is just wierd. How the hell does that work? Flash is not nearly as fast as DRAM and it loses data after multiple write cycles. Ordinary flash drives are even slower than the hard drives usually.
Or is it just a way to store Superfetch profiles, rather than actual data.
Could someone explain that to me?

JoshRountree wrote:

The benefits of using flash memory as opposed to hard drives is the reduced latency in seeks. Although the flash memory has slower access times, it is randomly accessible, whereas a hard drive has to seek. (I think)

There's a really cool/nifty/gadget out called an i-ram that does something similar.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

While hard drives are faster than USB2 for sequential I/O, USB2 based flash is significantly faster for satisfying random reads, which we have found to be a prime factor in poor system responsiveness. External Memory Devices serve as an extension of the data caching capabilities of main memory. All writes are pushed through to disk, random reads are serviced where possible from the EMD and sequential reads are serviced from the hard drive.