Riding Herd

Many folks have noticed that Mike Swanson's weeks of hard work have paid off, and the full video, PPT and demo recordings of PDC 05 sessions are now online (and that the DVD sets for attendees will be on the way soon as well.) Seems like the videos are...

We heard from some attendees that they were having a hard time choosing between DAT209 (WinFS Future Directions: An Overview) and TLN306 (The .NET Language Integreate Query Framework: An Overview) in the Wednesday 1:45pm timeslot. To make it a little...

One of the goodies that PDC attendees will find in their swag bag is a poster called "Lighting up on Windows Vista". It lists the top 10 things developers can do to build apps that will run like a dream on our new OS release. We've now posted a short...

The PDC content team is on site in LA! It's been an intense last month getting ready for the event, which explains the absence of any interesting blog posts from me. If I have some time in the next few days before the show starts, I will try to write...

Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference...by popular request, the current list of PDC sessions is now available as an Excel spreadsheet , or as RSS^H^H^H Web Feeds ;). Any changes we make to session titles, speakers, timeslots, etc (and...

The closer the PDC track team comes to locking down our session list, the more we hear from internal Microsoft platform folks who wonder why their sessions didn't make the cut (or why out of the 10 sessions they proposed, only 1 got approved). When the...

I've noticed that a couple of the track owners on our virtual content team have started blogging about PDC. Mike Fitzmaurice is one of the track owners for our Office 12 and Sharepoint content. He talked a bit about why he's excited to have a signifcant...

I have a long list of backlogged things to post about...but for now, I just want to quickly note that registration is open ! We also posted 50+ session titles -- these aren't the final titles, but they give a pretty good flavor for the kinds of things...

I saw it on a banner ad on microsoft.com, so it must be true! PDC reg opens June 7...

It’s been a while since I last posted about PDC content planning. Thing suddenly got very busy in the last month, as we got ready to move into the session development phase. One of the things that makes PDC unique among Microsoft conferences is...

Thanks to the 96 of you who took the time to complete the survey . I'm just getting started looking through the results, here are some of things I've noted so far: You spend most of your time on the job doing dev/implementation work, but architecture...

12 devs in a focus group may not be able to represent the entire dev community, but surely my 10's of readers do, right? Well, maybe not, but still I'd like to know more about what value you get out of dev conferences. I created a short survey at http...

My post last week in response to Scott generated some good discussion about the value of developer conferences in general. It certainly got me pondering more about how we ought to think of the value of PDC. As luck would have it, our creative agency for...

Lazycoder : Microsoft Tech Ed and PDC not worth the time or money What do you really miss by not going to a PDC ? You miss a chance to learn about upcoming MS technology directly from the architects and developers who are building it, and you miss a chance...

I've seen several comments about the issues with WLAN accessibility at PDC '03. I am delighted to say that there is someone thinking hard about how to improve the situation for PDC ’05, and even more delighted still to say that it isn’t me. I missed the...

There's an interesting discussion about PDC over at Yahoo Groups' Windows Technical: Off Topic forum . Kevin Hegg writes : The last three PDC's were overcrowded, with the last PDC being the worst. The solution seems pretty simple to me. Stop selling more...

This week, the team is under an enormous amount of stress as the deadline approaches for the decision that will make or break PDC 2005: the swag bag. Sitting in Steve's office are three different styles of computer bag, and we must choose which one we...

Okay, maybe not so stunning, but in response to several requests that have come in from commenters and private email, I’m happy to be able to share a few key details that might help those of you trying to figure out your conference plans and budget for...

I’m trying to figure out how we should handle the PDC pre-conference this year, and wanted to see if anyone has input for us. At last year’s PDC, we provided a day of pre-conference content. For an extra fee, PDC attendees could register to attend one...

[Update: we now have an official feed for the main PDC event page, in addition to the community/blog feed below] The Microsoft Communities team was kind enough to create a special category for MSDN blog posts relating to PDC 2005. If you want to keep...

I’ve spent the past two months trying to figure out what it means to be PDC Content Owner, and how I’m supposed to do my job. I’m not entirely sure I’ve figured it out yet ;) I know that by Sep 13, I need a plan for how to keep several thousands of attendees...

Scoble found my PDC post pretty fast, and so in anticipation of an increase in traffic, I figured I'd try to proactively answer a few likely questions: When is PDC : Sep 13-16, in Los Angeles. We usually do a day of pre-conference training as well. When...

Back in January, my manager ( Steve Cellini ) mentioned that he’d kindly volunteered me to be Content Owner for PDC . I haven’t blogged about that yet, as I’ve been spending the past 6 weeks trying to get my head wrapped around what exactly it is that...