A feeble attempt to close a long gap in posts... with some "easy" news: In case anyone didn't know... PDC05 started yesterday with a bang :-)

You can follow the blogosphere buzz at PDC Bloggers 2005, on http://pdcbloggers.net. We'll also be posting new content to Channel 9 every day. RSS feeds (which are consumed by a really cool Vista-based RSS app which is driving the house monitors here at the event) are available on the PDC info site, http://commnet.microsoftpdc.com. Lots of attendees are posting lots of pictures of the event (244 as of this post) and things vaguely related to the event, here.

The PDC05 team is exhausted, ecstatic, elated, and in awe of the community, all at once. So if you run into one of us, that would explain the confused but happy looks on our faces.

THANK YOU to everyone who's here in LA at PDC05 and to the community at large for supporting this event. And THANKS to the best event team in the business...

OK, we can't keep a secret. Check it out here.

A couple of us (Jeff Sandquist, Jeremy Mazner, Michael Lehman, and me) recorded a show for .NET Rocks on Friday, with PDC05 as the topic. It'll be available on Monday, 6/20. We had fun with this show.

Someone (Carl?) asked us what the "vision" for PDC05 is... we more or less answered / rambled about that PDC is guided by "vision" on several levels:

• Platform strategy
• Content strategy / plan
• Community aspirations

"Platform" strategy: as seen at the PDC, mostly comes about as you might expect: top-down, from our senior executives. However, there's obviously a pretty strong influence as well from innovation at the individual / product team level... sometimes those people might see the forest (as opposed to the trees) better or differently from our execs. At the confluence of these two forces it can get pretty interesting at times.

As part of the "Platform" part of PDC05 planning, we sat down this week with a couple of VPs we happened to find around :-) and reviewed many aspects of PDC05, some in more detail than others.For instance, we lightly touched on aspects of our overall creative style for the PDC (you may have noticed it, we call it "string theory" :-) and the latest Community plans, including the 2 contests. We spent most of the meeting discussing how we'll communicate our strategy for the "Longhorn Wave" of the platform, and which topics should get covered in which keynotes. I'm not going to get into the details of that keynote planning... not only because we want it to be a surprise :-) but also because things will undoubtedly change & be refined in the coming months.

A goal for the "platform" strategy is to yield a framework that can be used to guide the content process. We want everyone involved to be able to answer the question, "What is this PDC about?" and "Where is the platform going"?

(A note here about how to prepare for a VP-level review... it's a 5-step process:

1. In the week leading up to the review, you should attempt to anticipate alll possible questions and prepare answers in advance 
2. The day before the review, you should frantically look for notes from the last review because you seem to remember a really important follow-up with someone who, you just found out, is, like, on vacation for 5 weeks without access to email
3. The night before the review, you should mistakenly overwrite the latest version of the powerpoint deck with one from the previous week, when all you had going for you was a nice template
4. The morning of the review, you should find the notes from the last review and realize that you got it all wrong
5. The hour before the review, every printer in the building (and perhaps the entire campus) will have run out of paper, ink, be jammed, or be in the middle of yearly servicing.

If you don't follow these steps, you just won't be in the right frame of mind when you sit down with your VPs. And remember, it's imperative that you follow these steps in the stated order)

"Content" strategy or plan: Jeremy has blogged a bit about how, among other things, we're "rededicating" this PDC to deep drill-downs and strategic "inspections" that could only be delivered at the PDC. This thinking came about by reviewing feedback from previous PDCs, and by conducting not a few interviews with people around the company, people who've been around for a while and know the "heritage" of the PDC. The thinking here has evolved a bit since January, as the Track Advisors / Owners have internalized it in the face of hard decisions about sessions and topic coverage. One line of thinking has the track owners being very consciencious about how many sessions should be dedicated to "Longhorn Wave" technologies, and how many should be focused on stuff beyond that (answer: very heavily weighted towards the Longhorn Wave stuff). Another line of thinking has the trackowners thinking hard about having too many "onesie" sessions, where we try to cover an entire technology / product is a single breakout session... we're worried that it's hard to go deep or otherwise do the product / technology justice in a single session.

Compared to PDC03, when I was content owner, it's clear to me that for this PDC the thinking and process is a bit sharper. While I think we did a pretty good job in '03 :-) I'm thinking that attendees will benefit from the extra focus this time around.

Community aspirations: I'm using the word "aspirations" here because I think one should be careful when using the word "strategy" when it comes to the Community. I think Channel 9 can maybe be thought of as being strategic in its influence, but it really was an experiment when it launched. At PDC03, we tried out a number of Community-oriented things that were new at the time, but with 2 years distance now, they seem quite natural (or even quaint :-). For '05 we will try to incrementally improve on these things; I say "incremental" because "Community" has a life of its own... we want to be respectful of that. Jeff and the Channel 9 team have engineered a new PDC-focused area on Channel 9, and plan videos, podcasts, forums, and some fun contests. Those guys have some add'l things planned, but we're not sure of our ability to pull 'em off, so we're not ready to share yet.  :-)

For the first time in a while - I think - we also had what amounts to a top-down vision for "Demand Generation" (term used to describe the marketing activities focused on PDC registration) and for the "Creative Style". The "String Theory" creative style, for instance, was inspired by the abstract notion of how developers "see things differently" than other people, and the power of Community when developers interact with each other. Thus the "Developer Powered" tagline. 

Obviously the key reason for executing well on the Platform, Content, and Community vision-things is that we think it'll result in a more useful & valuable PDC for attendees. When it comes to the demand generation and creative style work... well, we've been having fun with all this and we hope you enjoy it and that the PDC is a more fun experience as a result.

Listen to PDC BuzzCast #2, hosted by Michael Lehman, a technical evangelist on Jeff Sandquist's team. Michael is working up a great series of podcasts on the way to PDC05; they're in the new PDC area on Channel 9.

This time, Michael (who has a truly authenic radio voice, doesn't he?) interviewed Jeremy Mazner, PDC content owner. In this podcast, Jeremy paints some details on the process and adds his sense of why PDC is special and who should attend. I think he hits all the right points.

I was content owner for PDC03 so I can say with some authority that Jeremy is doing a great job "riding herd" over the track {advisors | owners | drivers} that he meets with every week for 4+ hours (this week it was 6 hours, over 3 meetings).

PDC is a unique "occurrence" where very senior and yet hands-on people in the product teams come together on a regular basis and subject their technologies, world-views, and developer perspectives to very intense scrutiny, analysis, discussion, and argument, with the goal of distilling the platform news into strategically-targeted overviews and deep-dives for people (architects, developers) who need to understand the future of the platform. It's not training, it's grokking the future.

The title is a shameless attempt to draw attention to another open position on the team: Longhorn ISV "Ascend" Evangelist. The full job description is here. The simplest description of this role is that you'd focus on getting ISVs to adopt the latest features of Longhorn and WinFX. "Ascend" is the name of our evangelism program that focuses on collaboration with the field to identify and engage with the top 300 or so ISVs in the world, showing them the coolness that is the new platform. The world is your oyster (does that expression translate well?) when it comes to the range of kinds of ISVs you'd work with.

The person in this role would work with the other technical evangelists on the team, such as Karsten, Tim, Jeremy, Mike Swanson, and Jeff :-). And Scoble, who might want to shoot some video on you and what you do. And of course, if you start soon enough, you'll get to work on PDC05...

Yes, it's been a while since my last post. I wish I could say that since then I've learned to play a musical instrument, or a new language. But no.

I did find myself standing at the front door to my house looking for the cardreader. "They" say that the purpose of time is to keep everything from happening at once, so maybe my excuse is that lots has been going on? Does that work for you???

Whatever. Since January PDC'05 has gathered lots of internal momentum, which is only partially visible from the outside. Believe me, it's bustin' to get out. Soon enough: registration for PDC'05 will open on June 7th. 

Some quick glimpses of what we've been up to, PDC'05-wise:

• As noted earlier, Jeremy Mazner is the Content Owner for this PDC. He's cranked up the "Track Process", the most visible aspect of which is a weekly gathering of senior product team folks from around the company. Their goal, under Jeremy's guidance, is to figure out how to describe to PDC attendees where their respective parts of the platform are going. A lot of the startup cost in this is figuring out the rules of engagement... for instance, what are the criteria by which a specific product or technology should get airtime at the PDC? How much airtime? In what form (breakout session, Hands-on Lab, lunch session, etc)?

These meetings are typically fun since everyone is excited to talk about their stuff. But it's definitely not all fun. PDC has a finite number of session timeslots, and, frankly, there are limitations on what the typical attendee's head can hold. A key value-add of the folks participating in the Track Process is to provide focus and weighting to the PDC content.

I did my best to make sure that Track Meeting #1 kicked off by bringing 4 dozen Krispy Kreme donuts. Which, it turned out, no one ate. I tried.

This excellent Track Process team has cranked out the 6 tracks we will focus on at the PDC. You can see the 1-line descriptions of those tracks here. From here we'll generate sessions, HOLs, and other structured content around that track structure. We will publish session details as soon as we can so you can see what you'll be missing if you don't come to this PDC :-)

• We spent much more time that you would expect coming up with the tagline for PDC'05: Developer Powered.

Why did it take so long to come up with those 2 words? We talked to a lot of people, internal and external, about what the PDC means to them. We talked to ourselves, a lot, about what the PDC means to us, and how to express that in a silly tagline that no one will remember anyway? At no point, I swear, did it get Dilbert-ish, but I was on the watch for it.

You'd be suprised how much people inside this company care about that tagline. It's actually reassuring, in a way... to me it shows how vital (alive) the PDC is for this company. However, for the poor soul who has the job of delivering a tagline (more proof of how special the PDC is... it's run by a bunch of technical types), the result is careening adventure  (get people in a room, brainstorm, write the results down, rinse, repeat, try it out on innocent bystanders). In the end, the whole process helped to make sure that we're all on the same page re: what this event is about.

I'm not going to reveal how "Developer Powered" actually came about, but we all like it because it conveys the strong sense of Developer Community that exists at PDC, and the central focus of the content at PDC: the developer platform. While stuck in traffic on 520 I also work on triple- and quadruple-overloadings for "Developer Powered", which I won't impress on you, dear reader, just yet.

Astute observers may also notice the kinda-out there Creative Style for this PDC:

We're really excited about this, too... but that's for another post.

• Jeff Sandquist (just love his tagline) has signed up to be Community Owner for PDC'05. This wasn't a case of Jeff not running away fast enough, even though he's on my team... Jeff did this role for PDC'03 and he's the perfect fit for it. This wasn't a suprise to anyone :-) Jeff has a lot of ideas on how to "iterate forward" on the community concepts introduced at PDC'03. There's "online community", which involves blogs, etc, and "offline community", which happens in meatspace. The B-A-R is one manifestation of "offline community".

Much more than the above has been going on... lots of discussions with individuals and teams and assorted execs, etc. But I wanted to provide a glimpse into the biggest moving pieces (content, community) and some of the other more subtle things that are getting us warmed up for the week of September 12, 2005. It takes a lot to make something like this happen. My experience as content owner for PDC'03 was that it brought out the best in the company...

PS: the title of this post is most assuredly not a lame throw-away that I thought up in, say, 5 seconds late on a Saturday night. Rather, it reflects my deep commitment to do my part for science.

Seems like only yesterday that we were down at the LA Convention Center, closing up after the panel sessions, enjoying one last espresso at the embedded Starbucks, wondering one more time what the “Wondrous Guy” (the guy on the PDC banners who is staring skyward) was thinking, and then we were all jetting off in different directions into the particulate-enhanced sunset.

But we were back this week! You’d think that we would have the layout and appearance of the place permanently imprinted in our brains by now, but it really is helpful to wander the halls, rooms, and other spaces as you contemplate new ideas and improvements.

Jeff was there, looking for the Community Angle, as were as the “Business Owner” and the “Logistics Owner”, our logistics contractor, and a designer from the Shell team...

We almost had the whole place to ourselves… the “California Gift Show” was setting up in the “South Exhibit Hall” where, during PDC’03, attendees scarfed-down meals and visited exhibitors, sponsors, and Microsoft product booths. Instead of ISVs stocking booths with brochures and evaluation CDs and filling bowls with hard candy and pens that light up, you had an infinite variety of vendors arranging an infinite variety of… “gifts”. If you’re in LA this weekend you might check it out and let me know what you bought.

We spent a lot of time contemplating the “South Exhibit Hall”. Despite the chaotic scene created by hundreds of “gift” vendors setting up, it was very helpful to see the space again. We have great hopes that we’ll be able to execute on some ideas we have for that space this time around, making it a community hub for the show. The one-liner is that we’re considering physically aggregating the Hands-on Labs, Track Lounges, Ask the Experts, Exhibitors, Sponsors, Product Pavilions, and meal “features” as elements in a single structured area. If you’re not in a breakout, you might be drawn to this area to connect up with someone, relax and eat a donut, talk to an exhibitor, try out some code, find someone who knows something you want to know, etc.

As a software guy, I’m used to the easy symbolic manipulation of abstractions, but that won’t do for the PDC when you’re aiming to turn a 346k sq-ft space (we took to calling it the "Big A** Room") into a comfy living room. You need to see it and walk it. Fortunately, these musings are backed by a very experienced logistics team at Microsoft, who are in turn backed by a really really experienced logistics company, Realtime Productions. Ok, it’s probably not on the same scale as, say, hitting a 1 second launch window for launching a comet probe, but it’s complicated enough that you need to and smooth execution requires you to be “hands-on” enough that you just can’t throw lots of people at the problem… if you know what I mean.