One Week to PDC 2009

With one week to go before PDC starts, the times and rooms for all of the sessions are now available. While things are still subject to change, now would be a good time to make a preliminary plan for your week if you're going to be attending PDC.

My talk this year is currently scheduled for 1:45 Thursday in Petree Hall D. For those that have attended prior PDCs in Los Angeles, the Petree Hall rooms are the large theaters in the west wing. Depending on how many people show up I may have to retarget some of the content to reflect a broader audience (capacity of the room is about 1100). I build in a lot of flexibility when I talk though to make these types of adjustments.

Here's what I'm planning to cover on the topic of application server extensibility in only 60 minutes (note that I'm jumping in to give a workflow talk; Ed Pinto will be delivering the session on WCF this year):

- Understanding the application server and workflow architecture (just enough to get you through the talk)

Hosting options for workflow, including building your own application host  

• How and why we built a new model for persisting durable services
• Customizing how instance persistence works, from tweaking how a variable is recorded all the way to building an entirely new instance store
• How workflow execution is tracked
• Customizing what events get tracked and where the data gets recorded

Workflow persistence has completely changed from past versions starting in .Net 4 Beta 2 and this will probably be your only chance to get a detailed explanation before the release.