PDC - The day after.

The flight back to Dallas yesterday went much smoother than the flight out to LA. In my opinion this was one of the biggest PDCs ever. While it is depressing to have to wait for all the new tech to be releases, it is great to have insight into what the future holds. MS is being much much more transparent these days which is a good thing.

Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina gave a dynamite precon session on framework design guidelines. Their book of the same name is a must read for anyone doing software development.

Mark Russinovich and David Solomon gave a great talk on Windows internals. There were alot of good little nuggets on 64bit. The parts about security really cleared up a few question marks that I had. I've seen Solomon speak before so some of this was a repeat for me but everytime I see these guys I gleen a little bit more of understanding.

Of course Anders talks on LINQ and C# futures were mind blowing. The folks at MS research and the C# team are doing incredible work making language improvments that will increase developer productivity.

Erik Meijer and his crew of "language pimpers" gave a great talk on dynamic languages and the CLR. All I can say is keep your eye on VB9. By sheer chance I happened to sit at the same lunch table with Erik on the last day of the conference. He's a great guy to talk to about what MS is doing with languages. Alot of the LINQ technology is a direct result of his work on Cw (COmega).

Rico Mariani gave another great talk about debugging memory problems using tools such as VADump, windbg and CLRProfiler. I definitly have a bit of studying to do in this area. He also hilighted the major perf improvements that have been made in the 2.0 CLR.

I was so caugt up in the LINQ and language futures stuff I only had time to attend one Atlas session. I will definitly be spending some study time on Atalas in the short term though. What I saw was pretty impressive. Alot of the low level JavaScript stuff such as browser compatibility, OO features such as inheritance, public, protected private members is nothing new. You can find these types of script libs all over the web. It's cool that MS will be providing this functionality as part of ASP.NET. What most people will enjoy most will be the set of server controls that will be built up on top of this.

So now that PDC is over and I have to go back to the real world and my very real job, I'm gonna get some much needed sleep. Here's to all you guys at MS that put on a great conference! Thanks!