Dave Bost

Holy Cow! PDC’08 is next week and I’m just now coming to grips with all of the activities, both day and night, that will surely keep me from the beauty sleep I so desperately need.

I’ve laid out my PDC schedule below. As you can see, I’m basically nuts. Sure, I’m ambitious now in trying to hit as much as possible, but we know how a PDC week can catch up to you. If you’re looking for me, there’s a decent chance you’ll find me in any of the places listed below. Or there may even be a better chance of catching me plopped in a bean bag chair somewhere.

Not only am I going to try and squeeze in everything below, but I’ll also be spending a majority of my time in the Open Spaces area, the Partner Expo, the Product Pavilion, the Hands-on-Labs and squeezing in as many Thirsty Developer interviews as we can. Yes… I’M NUTS! If you’re as crazy as me, I’d recommend you reading Thomas Lewis’ The Devil’s Field Guide to the PDC for some tips and advice on how to enjoy (and survive) PDC.

Here’s the schedule I’ve mustered up so far. It will change. I guarantee it. For any updates, changes or status checks, just follow me on Twitter.

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it. – Willy Wonka

Sunday, Oct. 26th

• Arrive at LAX around 11AM
• Sunday afternoon, a pre-conference networking event for some of our special guests where we’ll apparently get to play tourist or cowboy
• Sunday evening, where else but Party with Palermo

Monday, Oct. 27th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson
• 11:00AM, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010 (153)
• 12:15PM, (Available for Lunch, Let’s Meet!)
• 12:45PM, Microsoft Expression Blend: Tips & Tricks (408B)
• 1:45PM, ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap (153)
• 3:30PM, Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features (151)
• 5:15PM, Too many to choose! (Web Dev Futures, Framework Design Guidelines, Hanselman’s talk, VSTS Database Edition, Agile w/VSTS, Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service)
• 8:00PM, Private Customer function
• 9:00PM, Show Off
• After Party, the Lounge at Westin Bonneventure

Tuesday, Oct. 28th

• (Available for Breakfast, Let’s Meet!)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell
• 11:00AM, Keynote, Don Box and Chris Anderson
• 12:30PM, (Available for Lunch, Let’s Meet!)
• 12:45PM, Coding4Fun (403AB) or What I Learned Building my First Live Mesh Application (501B)
• 1:45PM, WPF Roadmap (515B)
• 3:30PM, Microsoft Silverlight Futures (153)

I have (4) tickets to a taping of “Rules of Engagement” at Sony Studios at 5PM. Tough choice between this and the attendee party. If you want the tickets or want to talk me into going, let me know. If I blow it off, than it’s…

• 5:15PM, ASP.NET and jQuery (403AB)
• 7:00PM, Attendee Party at Universal Studios
• 11:00PM, After Party at the Lounge at Westin Bonneventure

Wednesday, Oct. 29th

• (Available for Breakfast, Let’s Meet!)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Rick Rashid
• 10:30AM, Parallel Programming (Petree Hall CD)
• 12:00PM (Lunch), Silverlight Controls Roadmap (404A) or XNA Game Studio (501B)
• 1:15PM, Programming Live Services using Non-Microsoft Technologies (501B)
• 3:00PM, A Day in the Life of a Could Service Developer (Petree Hall CD)
• 4:45PM, A Lap Around “Oslo” (502A)
• 7:00PM – 2:00AM, Customer Events + Underground@PDC

Thursday, Oct. 30th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM, Services Symposium Services (515B)
• 10:30AM, Silverlight 2 Control Model (Petree Hall CD)
• 12:00PM (Lunch), WPF: Data Centric Applications (408A) or Cloud Computing (Petree Hall CD)
• 1:45PM, ASP.NET Futures (Petree Hall CD)
• 3:00PM, Head home after an *exhausting* week at PDC!

PDC08