Day 4 Sessions
Friday, 16th September, 2005
I started the day with an instructor-led lab building a recipe programme with an emphasis on using Indigo. Alas, the lab was extremely rushed, possibly because of a late start because the speaker's wireless headset had been left on overnight and new batteries needed to be found. This was not a lot more than a fast 'cut and paste' exercise and once you fall behind you're done basically. I felt bad about leaving early but think I was the fifth to leave after falling behind so I clearly wasn't the only one finding the pace way too fast.
My first technical session was with Chris Sells and Doug Purdy, showing how 'WPF (Avalon) and WCF (Indigo) = Magic'. To be honest, I'm not sure I learnt a lot in this session as the continual humour and irreverent banter between these two tended at times to distract from what they were trying to show. But it was probably the most enjoyable session of all those I've attended and there were a lot of belly laughs from this excellent double act. Basically this was just what was needed first thing Friday morning for most attendees who were suffering the effects of too many late nights partying.
Next up was Ben Armstrong with some tips and tricks on using Virtual PC. A lot of the information was very basic, but there were some nuggets in Ben's talk and I found it to be a worthwhile session, although you can probably get most of what was in this session just by viewing the slides.
One of the best things about PDC is that you get copies of all the presentation slides AND the online labs made available to you for download. Having been warned that last PDC these disappeared pretty fast from the event web site, I spent most of the morning downloading these. Even with the super-fast Ethernet connectivity available at the PDC (averaging 6MB/sec) it still took over an hour to get everything. I printed off a list of all the presentations at 2pm and yet at 2.10pm two new presentations had been added. It was hard to keep up and unfortunately the plug was pulled on the network at around 2.30pm as those with long flights ahead wanted the event to finish.
Later in the evening I met for a drink with a couple of Channel 9'ers who I hadn't had a chance to meet up to that point and Adam from the programming team joined us again, as did Robert Scoble on his way back from some other party. It was a fun evening and a nice 'end' to the PDC.
I came to PDC, expecting another TechEd, but feel that this was a much better value-for-money event in so many different ways. Of course this has been a landmark PDC with so many new products announced and demonstrated - most experienced PDC veterans are saying this is the biggest PDC since the Windows 95 announcement over 10 years ago. I'm glad I came, and suspect this won't be the last PDC event I attend. There will be no more blog entries (this entry is being typed late on Saturday after I've caught up on some much needed sleep and sorted out a new suitcase to get the PDC 'swag' back home). Thanks for reading!
