The Professional Developers Conference is Microsoft’s largest shindig for developer’s in the world. I’ve attended this twice in my life and… well… it’s really something else. Everyone there is a seriously hardcore developer of some sort – as in, this is their livelyhood.
Occasionally, you’ll see execs or marketing folks from companies trying to court Microsoft or trying to sell to the developers there, and of course you’ll also see recruiters galore hunting down good talent, but by far and large, most everyone’s a Visual Studio trained developer.
Usually over 10,000 developers show up for the week to hear over 160 different presentations and sessions on developing for Microsoft’s platform. And it’s not cheap – it’s basically the same cost to register as TechEd so if you don’t speak C# or Visual Basic or at least Java, this probably isn’t for you.
The registration site just went live at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/. Why do you care? Well, for one you can get $200 off by registering early… and Ray Ozzie is going to be keynoting the event. Additionally, they’ve provided a number of interesting resources for people considering going, including:
Pre-conference sessions including:
Topic list, including:
- Cloud Service Development
- Building Block Services
- Advanced Workflow
- CRM/Dynamics Application Development
- Internet Explorer 8’s Rendering Engine
- Silverlight Graphics
- Data Services-based Apps
- Developing .NET/ASP.NET for Server Core
- Live Mesh Development
- Live Platform Development
- Developing for Occasionally Connected Clients
- Office Business App Development
- Scalable Storage in the Cloud
- Developing Silverlight Applications for Mobile Devices
- Large Scale Web Apps over SQL Server 2008
- COM Interop
- SQL Server Data Services
- Unified Communications Futures
- Visual Studio Team System – Software Diagnostics
- Windows 7 Graphics Advancements
- Windows 7 Energy Efficiency
- Windows 7 Touch Computing
- Windows 7 Web Services in Native Code
- Windows Mobile Location-based Services
- Windows Mobile Web Development
- Windows Presentation Services – Extensible Bitmap Effects, Pixel Shaders
And to quote Mike Swanson:
We’re doing social at the PDC this year, so be sure to join our Microsoft PDC Facebook group, our PDC2008 Twitter feed, and the Microsoft PDC2008 group on Flickr. Oh…you might also want to subscribe to the PDC blog for key information and updates about the event. Note that the PDC blog feeds the public web site, so no need to subscribe in both places.
Last, show your PDC2008 spirit! Grab some of the blog bling and wallpaper.
kurtsh
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 