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Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 2009) : Tuesday

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This is the first time I’ve been to PDC in a number of years, and it is fun to be back.  Here are some impressions really more than details about the first day.

  • It is big.  Just walking around the LA Convention Center from session to session gives a sense of the thousands of people here (although one regular attendee told me that it seems a bit smaller than a few years ago).  Walking from one session to another can take 5-10 minutes as I traverse elevators, long corridors, etc.
  • The typical room seems to hold about 500 people and most are fairly full.  One session I tried to attend (I arrived ten minutes late for one session this morning and found I couldn’t get in – the room was full to legal capacity).  But since there are 10-12 sessions running in parallel, it wasn’t too hard to find another session to attend.
  • Cool to see my old colleague, Eric Lawrence, talk about Fiddler to a very enthusiastic crowd of users.  This is a really impressive web debugging tool that Eric has developed in his spare time – he noted that his work on it is going down now that he’s engaged to be married!  I learned a bunch of things I didn’t know about Fiddler despite being one of the earlier users when Eric worked for me in Office.
  • A lot of the sessions are pretty code-intensive, rather than slideware overviews, which is really good.  Nothing helps me understand something better than seeing the actual code.  For instance, one problem I’d been having with DataServiceContext became clearer from seeing Chris Anderson type some code using this class in a session on Entity Framework v4.
  • The keynote this morning on Azure featured the White House CIO, Vivek Kundra, trumpet how Azure can be used to help provide more seamless data exchange through a project code-named Dallas.  That and the demo of how blog-provider WordPress is using Azure as an early adopter for part of their site were the highlights for me of the keynote.
  • Lots more on PDC at https://microsoftpdc.com/resources.