Top Ten Things at PDC 2009

  • Article

I’m sitting at LAX writing this summary of PDC which is just wrapped up.  Although I went “on my own dime” (i.e. I paid my own way), it was definitely worth it for the ten reasons below…

  1. Learning a bunch more about Azure storage and SQL for Azure at Jai Haridas’ session and Brad Calder’s session on blobs, queues and the just-announced xDrive – which allows an Azure page blog to be formatted and mounted as an NTFS virtual drive.
  2. Microsoft Expression Blend’s SketchFlow, which is an amazingly easy-to-use and complete prototyping environment, described by Christian Schormann in a session marred only by his cough, which was very, very loudly amplified throughout the room until the sound guy caught on and reduced the volume when Christian turned from the audience to cough.  This falls into one of those things which I have installed on my machine, booted once and never really spent the time to figure out – now I will.
  3. A very demo-intensive and impressive session on the Bing Maps API by Keith Kinnan. I knew Virtual Earth (now Bing Maps) had an API, but I had no idea how sophisticated it is and how many very cool things can be built quite easily.
  4. Ray Ozzie’s announcement in the Tuesday keynote of a project codenamed “Dallas” which is an ambitious attempt to provide very high-value data sources licensed under a uniform EULA and for minimal or no cost.   There weren’t a lot of details on this, but stay tuned on this one – combined with the ADO.Net RESTful data services, this could be pretty cool.  I didn’t make it to Zach Owen’s session on this but spent some time with the Dallas team members at the Ask the Experts reception Wednesday night and it’s clear they have some ambitious plans for this.  There is more information here.
  5. Eric Lawrence’s great session on Fiddler, which has has an amazing run of success – Eric told me at the reception that night that he’s getting up to 3500 downloads a day of Fiddler!
  6. Matthew Kerner’s session on Azure Diagnostics, Logging and Management APIs, which was a very clear description of this area that I’ve been working in since the pre-PDC bits were dropped in mid-October.  Matt did a great job of summarizing this and clarifying a few things I didn’t 100% get.
  7. The session by Shyam Pather and Chris Anderson on ADO.Net Entity Framework 4. I kind of understood EF before this session, but this dynamic duo – with Shyam narrating and Chris typing away as if he were a voice-recognition and automatic code correction engine – was quite impressive.
  8. A fun session on C++ improvements in VS 2010 – good to remember that the whole world hasn’t moved to XAML and C#!
  9. Pablo Castro’s session on ADO.Net Data Services (formerly code-named Astoria) which was a very lucid and passionate description of why RESTful data services matter so much, and an impressive summary of all the sources being exposed through ADO.Net Data Services (now apparently renamed “WCF Data Services”) and the exposure of this in everything from Excel to Silverlight to Azure.  Very impressive.

And the number one thing about this PDC…  Steven Siinofsky’s announcement at the Wednesday keynote on Windows 7 that the Windows group had partnered with laptop manufacturer Acer to design a laptop optimized for Windows 7 – and that every PDC attendee was being given one!  What a brilliant way to jump-start development for Windows 7 features like location-awareness, multi-touch, etc.

There are still a bunch of sessions I didn’t make it to that I plan to watch online.

Updated 11/24 with some additional information on Dallas.