PDC planning and your input

Scobleizer

TrackBack — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:14:00 GMT

Scobleizer

re: PDC planning and your input

Brian Swanson — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:15:00 GMT

I attended the PDC in 2003 and was a little disappointed that there was little (actually none that I found) content on current technologies. I believe this was more because of my expectations for going to a conference than anything else.

Having now been to a PDC and knowing what to expect, I'll be attending the next one and looking forward to seeing the new technologies that will be available in the next 2-3 years...

re: PDC planning and your input

Jeffrey Scarpace — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:24:00 GMT

Jeremy, should we be sending you congratulations or sympathies for your being volunteered as Content Owner? :)

Seriously, though, I attend for all six reasons listed above, and I'd add a couple more:

- I hope to be able to give feedback to Microsoft on their products and technologies, especially regarding the developer interfaces;

- Microsoft throws really good parties for developers. ;)

I was greatly impressed with the cabanas at Tech-Ed 2004 (not so much the execution as the concept), and would like to see something in that vein for PDC.

Oh, and is there any word on academic discounts for registration?

Pre-emptive strike: What will you show at PDC?

Riding Herd — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 01:27:00 GMT

re: PDC planning and your input

Andre Da Costa — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:26:00 GMT

What are the primary objectives of PDC? Is it Longhorn focused or is just to talk about the past 9 months and the products you guys had released throughout the year such as XP Pro x64, Whidbey, SQL 2k5 and how you can start taking advantage of them and a little bit about Longhorn?

re: PDC planning and your input

Marco Russo — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:59:00 GMT

I'd like to spend my time between:
#3 40%
#2 25%
#1 20%
#5 15%

Pre-emptive strike: What will you show at PDC?

Riding Herd — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 03:15:00 GMT

re: PDC planning and your input

Jeremy — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:18:00 GMT

Marco: thanks for giving such a specific break down, that helps.

Andre, Brian: see http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2005/03/09/391235.aspx. If you're interested in current technology TechEd might be a better conference choice.

Jeffrey: probably a mix of both ;) As for academic discounts, what did you have in mind? I'm told that when we tried them in the past, not many people took advantage of it.

re: PDC planning and your input

Benjamin J. J. Voigt — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:19:00 GMT

Shame on me, I read the answers first. Now reading the original post, something else comes to my mind. PDC 2003 was great, but I missed the theoretical "edge". What do I mean? MSR wasn't there. Many devs I know at least have a master degree if not a PhD. We want to see some prototypes, it's ok if they don't work on a demo stage, but lets see the magic. Give us some "lab experience" beyond HOL (Which is fun, but really not much more then entertainment). Show us revolutionary new software development concepts, we all went to grad school, we'll understand.

On the other end of the spectrum I missed scenarios. How does RTC translate into higer employee productivity again? Where is the ROI of Team System? Show me how the RFIDs in every PDC attendee item populate the halls (That is, if you plant RFIDs :) ) and help you to find lost items in a fraction of a second. Where is the productivity leak in my current infrastructure and how do I fix it?

Grats to the challange, and the courage to tell everybody that it's you who took it ;)

P.S.: Oh, and make the W-Lan work this time ;->

re: PDC planning and your input

Steven Hartzog — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 02:04:00 GMT

#4: 40%
#5: 40%
#6: 20%

I attended PDC 2003, and I have to say I was completely overwhelmed (it was my first, and I was caught some sort of cold/flu in the first couple days).

If I had to add something... perhaps a team-coding lab where various attendees can form virtual teams in a lab - and build a functioning app together (following some sort of dev process tutorial and best practices brief). You know - using all the new features in VS2005 (NUnit, Code Coverage, Refactoring, App Modeling, Work-Flow of requirements, etc).

re: PDC planning and your input

Brad Abrams [MSFT] — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:48:00 GMT

Let me give you my perspective from a Microsoft employee… I want feedback! I want to hear what folks like and don’t like about V1.1 and 2.0… I love to hear where customers think our competitors have an edge on us or where we are not as productive as we could be. I think this is done in small groups (preferably over free food and drink ;-))

re: PDC planning and your input

Jeremy — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 20:15:00 GMT

PubSub found me another thread of comments about why people attend PDC:
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/ryan/archive/2005/03/09/7395.aspx

re: PDC planning and your input

Jeffrey Scarpace — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:27:00 GMT

On academic discounting: It depends on which academic audience you're trying to reach.

- If you're trying to get university/college CS people to come, most of those interested in attending would be students, who wouldn't be able to afford PDC even with a discount.

- If you're trying to get university/college IT staff to come, I think those people *would* be receptive to a discount, and they do have money in their budgets for training.

If academic discounts won't fly, is there anything available for MSDN Universal subscribers?

re: PDC planning and your input

jeremy — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 16:39:00 GMT

thanks all for the comments. There's another guy who got the honor of being community lead for PDC, which covers everything from W-LAN to ideas like Steven's team coding lab (a great idea, by the way!). The community owner hasn't yet outed himself on his blog, but when he does, I'll link to him.

ZogBlog

TrackBack — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 22:06:00 GMT

ZogBlog

When it rains it pours - open positions on the team

scellini's WebLog — Mon, 16 May 2005 06:14:23 GMT

This post isn't about the PDC. It's about the several open positions on my team: when we're not doing...