The PDC is over and I am home. I am taking a few minutes to be a little reflective and put down some thoughts.
1. The Acer PC was great. I heard people complaining about it not having more software (Visual Studio 2010 being the most common) or RAM but I have to say I was looking for a second machine for demos and this is better than what I was looking for. It makes up for no breakfast or attendee party. Of course now Microsoft has set an expectation and it will be interesting to see if they give out other goodies like a mobile phone at MIX (hint, hint…).
2. The roadmaps were shorter. In previous PDCs the roadmap slides seemed to go out to 3 or 5 years. Almost all of the roadmaps this year only went out 18 months. This felt more like a TechEd with the shorter timelines. Of course with how little in the 5 year time frame actually got delivered it is possible that Microsoft just realized that the information wasn’t as useful as they would hope.
3. Sessions were generally good quality. I went to more sessions than I blogged and for the most part the speakers were good and interesting. In the past it seemed they just grabbed some random employee to get up there and talk but maybe they screened the speakers or gave them some training.
4. Networking was even better than the sessions. I think the real reason to go to any conference is the learning. Some occurs from the sessions but more occurs from the conversations at lunch or in the hall ways. I have come to appreciate the need for this more as I work from home and don’t often get a chance to discuss things with my peers as often as I would like.
5. Focus on some general themes. In the past PDC seemed to be about anything that any product group wanted to announce. I didn’t see the breadth of topics represented this time. I think that was a feature of the shorter timeframe but it was nice to have focus on themes like SharePoint, Azure, Windows, and Visual Studio. It meant there were a lot of relevant sessions. The down side was that there were many times when I wanted to see 2 or 3 sessions in a given time slot.
I am looking forward to the next PDC and to see how things like Azure, “Dallas”, and Silverlight 4 evolve.