Dave Bost

It’s unfortunate, but true. Not everyone can attend the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC). That’s why the Microsoft Evangelist team across the U.S. is bringing the PDC to you. We’ve taken some of the best content from last week, packaged it up, wrapped it up in a pretty bow and will bring it to you through a series of events across the U.S. We’re calling it the MSDN Developers Conference (MDC).

In the grand tradition of DevDays events of the past, we will be conducting a 1-day conference covering some of the best sessions from PDC including announcements and developments around Visual Studio, the .NET Languages including F#, WPF, Silverlight, “Oslo”, Team System, ASP.NET, Parallel Programming and of course the Windows Azure Services Platform and Windows 7. We’ll also have a third track available for an Open Spaces area.

(As a side note, for those of you outside the U.S., poke your local Microsoft Evangelist team and ask them to bring MSDN DevCon to you!)

To register for the event in the city closest to you, simply click on the city link. This will take you to the landing page for that particular event where you will get more details about locations and the great speakers lined up for your city.

Locations
Date	City
12/09/2008	Houston, TX
12/11/2008	Orlando, FL
12/16/2008	Atlanta, GA
1/13/2009	Chicago, IL
1/13/2009	Minneapolis, MN
1/16/2009	Washington, DC
1/20/2009	New York, NY
1/22/2009	Boston, MA
1/22/2009	Detroit, MI
1/26/2009	Dallas, TX
2/19/2009	San Francisco, CA

If you missed the opportunity to attend PDC in-person, don’t miss your chance to hang with your developer community peeps at the MSDN Developers Conference.

You can also follow all the MSDN DevCon shenanigans on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Twemes and MSDN Social.

Announcements, Illinois Events, PDC08

After 8 years it was time to slap some fresh paint on the .NET logo. Affectionately known as the “Wave”…

PDC08

My good friend, co-hort, and the best damn female evangelist in Central Region, Jennifer Marsman, is a huge proponent of Women In Technology. In honor of that, I wanted to point out a few side-events taking place at next week’s PDC.

WomenBuild Workshop, Sunday, Oct. 26th, 2008, 11:30AM – 4:30PM

All PDC attendees (men and women) are invited to participate in this free workshop where you will work in small groups to solve real-life business challenges through the magic of LEGO® Bricks. How cool is that?!? Each team member will serve a particular responsibility in the team dynamic, bringing their own unique perspective to the group while collectively solving the problem at hand.

This is a great event to exercise your creative brain while at the same time networking and building relationships leading into the week long PDC conference.This event is part of the LEGO® Serious Play Program (LSP) and sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. Channel9 will be on hand to capture all of the creative energy. We may also try to squeeze in a Thirsty Developer interview or two as well.

Register: If you’d be interested in participating, please e-mail the Registration Desk at pdc2008@ustechs.com to sign up for the session. Space is limited, so please reserve your spot ASAP. This is first come, first serve. 

Also, be sure to join the Facebook WomenBuild group to be notified of upcoming WomenBuild events taken place across the nation and hopefully the world!

Women in Technology Reception, Wednesday, Oct. 29th, 2008, 6:00PM – 7:30PM, West Lobby

The PDC2008 Women in Technology (WIT) Reception is your chance to meet and share stories with the powerful, insightful, and intelligent women attending PDC2008. Enjoy drinks and snacks—as well as have the chance to win great prizes—while celebrating and learning from each other’s experiences and successes.

This gives me an opportunity to plug a recent Podcast we did with Jennifer and a few other highly intelligent and highly technical (Double Plus!) female co-workers of ours including Beth Humphreys, Angela Binkowski, and Rachel McKane (SalesGeek) about Women in Technology.

The only other thing to say is… Girlz Rule!

Announcements, PDC08

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