With a little over a month to go before Microsoft’s biggest and best developer event, I wanted to pick out which PDC sessions look super interesting (to me) this year:

Dan’s picks

• Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp (Mark Russinovich, Arun Kishan)– I’ll be setting up some projects during this time, but it would be great to go to this workshop. Note that this is FREE and you don’t have to be registered for PDC to go to it.
• Building Live Media Viewing Experiences using IIS Smooth Streaming (Vishal Sood) – We’re looking to add Smooth Streaming to Channel 9 so any details on the programmability would be appreciated, plus seeing how they did the NFL player will be interesting
• Code Contracts and Pex Go to a NerdDinner with ASP.NET MVC (Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux) – How to take an existing application and apply Pex for parameterized unit testing and code contracts for improved static checking
• Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks (DJ Park) – As I used to give this talk back in the day, it’ll be interesting to see how it’s evolved for Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft AJAX Library, jQuery and Visual Studio 2010 (Stephen Walther) – How VS 2010 will make building AJAX apps better
• ASP.NET MVC 2: The New Stuff (Stephen Walther) – ‘Nuff said
• How Visual Studio 2010 was built with WPF 4 (none listed) – This should be a great talk for anyone who wants high performance WPF and that has a legacy Win32 code base
• Dynamic binding in C# 4 (Mads Torgersen) – Everything that I’ve seen about C# 4.0’s dynamic features makes me fall in love all over again
• Networking and Web Services in Silverlight (none listed)– Interested in the “server push” pattern mentioned for scenarios like real-time chat
• Introduction to SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight (Torsten Grabs) – I know nothing about StreamInsight, but it’s a “platform” for processing data over real-time events (with LINQ) so I’m thinking a Twitter or Facebook scanner Coding4Fun project would be great for this
• Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic (Luca Bolognese) – Luca is always an amusing speaker and I’m sure this will be a fun session
• Advanced Diagnostics, Historical Debugging and Test Automation (Habib Heydarian) – Speaking of entertaining speakers, Habib’s session on cool new testing/debugging features for VS 2010 is another can’t-miss session.
• Silverlight Roadmap and Futures (Karen Corby) – Your first look at Silverlight 4
• Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure (Steve Marx) – Steve always builds cool demos (like faking how to be a CIA agent) and I’m sure this talk won’t disappoint
• Windows Azure Present and Future (Manuvir Das) – As I haven’t played with Azure yet, this should be a great place to start and to see their roadmap for the future

What PDC sessions are you most excited about?