Yah, when his Steveness come's on stage, you must say, 'I am not worthy, I am not worthy, I promise to keep MacBU honest and not listen to that Ballmer guy...'

Get there early for the Keynote.

When you see candy: stockpile, they don't have it out often enough. Same for drinks in the afternoons (if you want something other than coffee).

If you want the brownbag lunches get to lunch early. If you want breakfast then you have to get there before the first session of the day (something I couldn't manage on any day but the Monday).

Don't count on the wireless at WWDC. It's generally so overloaded that it's slow as... well, something really really slow. It's kind of usable for IRC, but that seemed about it for much of the day.

Get to the sessions early, ESPECIALLY the Enterprise IT ones. Those are habitually overflowed and underroomed.

Drop your bag off in your room before the beer bash

Nothing can prepare you for Stump

get to the keynote line reasonably early

well, there's a WWDC section on http://www.unsanity.org/archives/rant/caring_for_developers.php and I think that's the main thing you have to worry about.

hopefully the snacks will be better this year.

And make sure you are early for the more popular new APIs/Feature sessions. They fill up fast.

VIP and media people will be allowed to the top floor for the keynote first. If you are lucky enough to be in that group, you get to have fun watching everyone else make a mad dash to get a seat as close as possible to the stage. If you will be part of the everyday developers, get there early.

If something does not interest you, jump to another session. I've found that doing so was a good choice a few times.

Wireless can be spotty sometimes, but overall it is really good. Way better than TechEd 2005 *cough*.

Avoid the Enterprise IT sessions if you want to avoid high-level information. They tend to be geared for newbies and management. *no offense to anyone*

Grab a snack and put it in your bag even if you are not hungry, the food won't always be there; it tends to run out the last few days.

Starbucks is a block away!

Take a break sometime and lay on the grass at Yerba Buena: http://www.yerbabuenagardens.com.   It is across the street from Moscone West behind the Meteron.

GO TO THE CAMPUS BASH!

Enjoy yourself. Of all the technical conferences I ever been to, WWDC is by far the best experiences I ever had. The crowd is young and fun and very technically creative. It beats Agile and TechEd hands down.

My other suggestion would be to take a week off afterwards (admittedly I did so mainly because it was 13 hours of flying each way, and damn it I wanted two weeks off work) to recover.

I'll second the campus bash suggestion - that was definately worth it. The t-shirts on sale last really well too (I know, because I wear mine far more than I really need to), they tend to have specials on too, but you have to survive the line. (Consequently queue early for the busses to the bash.)

Also with regards to the Enterprise IT... they're certainly more for those who are support Macs than those who develop for them. Having said that I got some useful info out of them, especially the last session on the Friday afternoon.

Waiting list for French Laundry unfortunately gets you nowhere. I've done the same thing as you (Napa weekend after WWDC) 3 years running, and never managed it. Last year I not only tried booking the requisite 60 days in advance (couldn't get through, about 300 attempts) and phoned up 50 times during WWDC, but even turned up there on the day. No good. Go to La Toque as a fall-back : it's the next best, by a long way.

I'm not going to WWDC rgis year: I just spent a fortune spending a month in London and can't afford it. I'll watch the delayed keynote. (And go to alocal restaurant: pretty good here in Santa Barbara. Wine too.)

It's been my first time at WWDC, too (I was the guy with the Moose shirt sitting in the row behind you MacBU people at the Stevenote), so I blogged about my experiences and snuck in a few suggestions:

http://zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc2006-part1.htm

There's more entries like that, see the Archive.

It's been my first time at WWDC, too (I was the guy with the Moose shirt sitting in the row behind you MacBU people at the Stevenote), so I blogged about my experiences and snuck in a few suggestions:

http://zathras.de/angelweb/blog-wwdc2006-part1.htm

There's more entries like that, see the Archive.