by Van
11. November 2009 17:57
On November 17, I will be attending PDC09. This will be my 5th one. In 2000, I chose not to go to the PDC because it was in July, and I was already planning to go to Tech-ed in June. I said to myself what could happen in the software development world within a month? How wrong I was! That was probably the most important PDC ever because of the introduction of .Net! Later that year, I went to VS-Live Orlando and found out what I had missed. This is where I first saw .Net (VB.Net, C#, ASP.Net, ADO.Net). At that conference, the presenters were all using Visual Studio .Net, which I had never seen before. Then I found out the only way to have that software was by atteding PDC. It does not matter if you have an MSDN subscription; there is always software at the PDC that you can’t get anywhere else.
PDC is where Microsoft unveils software that may not appear in final versions for years. At PDC 2000, it was, of course, .Net.; PDC 2001, .Net Compact framework; PDC03, Longhorn(Vista), Widbey (Visual Studio 2005), Yukon(SQL Server 2005), Indigo(WCF), Avalon(WPF); PDC05, LINQ, ASP.NET Ajax; PDC08, Windows Azure. There are always great announcements at PDC about Microsoft direction. Beside great sessions on these new technologies, there are also hands-on-labs where you can go and play with these new technologies.
All in all, if you want to keep up with and stay ahead of the curve on Microsoft technologies, PDC is a must conference. You will always get software you can get no place else and you get to hear firsthand about Microsoft’s direction. I can’t wait to get there.