Post PDC, would I go again ???
Now that I have been back from the PDC for nearly a month I have been examining whether it was worth going. I should explain that I live in Swizerland which means it is a long journey and as I believe that you have to invest in your career I paid for the trip myself. I also combined the conference with a trip to San Francisco where I took a helicopter trip over and under the Golden Gate bridge.
It was great to meet lots of people, some of whom I only knew through either a blog, IM or email contact. Also it was wonderful to get to meet many of the Microsoft developers and to get answers I had about the different technologies. I attended all the sessions and learnt a lot of interesting information, though sometimes the most interesting stuff resulted from dinner conversatons or bumping into people in corridors.
The reason I attend the PDCs is to network and to get ahead of the curve and to keep my skills up to date. However, it now seems that as soon as a conference is over all the slides and audio commentary are put online.So now, for free, everyone gets the same information, in other words it is a level playing field. Not living or working in the states means that most of the networking I did was getting to know who are the right people to contact when you need to get questions answered rather than direct business contacts. Naturally, there are a whole set of people who just fun to get to know in person.
With the number of blogs now being written by Microsoft employees means that barriers to knowing the right person to ask to get the answer to an important question are significantly less than in the past.
If someone else was paying I would of course go again but maybe 2003 was my last PDC. All the information presented is just being distributed too widely and too quickly for the price to be justified.