The PDC was a Blast...
I just returned to Seattle from the PDC in LA (I ended up staying an extra day to present to the local .NET User Group on Whidbey Thursday night).
The conference was a stunning success and a lot of fun. The ASP.NET Whidbey sessions had great attendance (I had overflow in my overview talk on Monday, even though the room had 2,400 seats). The evals from the 20 ASP.NET Whidbey talks have been outstanding -- people clearly loved the content.
The best part of course was talking with developers from all over the world. The ask the experts session on Tuesday night was my favorite. I brought along my laptop and spent about 5 hours coding up answers to questions from folks as we all sat around a small table and talked about the various projects/ideas we were working on. Totally fun -- you can never do activities like that enough.
It is informal jam sessions like those, and seeing the excitement in the eyes of people as you use the new product in front of them, that make spending thousands and thousands of hours working on a long multi-year product cycle worth-while. I left LA totally amped and energized to finish Whidbey and ship this baby out the door.