Well, it's over. The event that I've been waiting to attend for litterally months has come to pass, and I've happy to say it was everything I hoped it would be and more. What a great week -- I think I just experienced geek heaven.
My laptop is in the other room, whirring happily while it installs the Whidbey bits. I think I'll go to Fry's tomorrow and price out some components to build a Longhorn box (and by "price out" I mean "spend too much money on"). The fun has only begun.
I was absolutely blown away by so many aspects of the conference that it's hard to mention them all here. I was practically giddy with excitement for pretty much the whole week. Sure, there were low points, but they were few and far between. I went to a couple of bummer sessions, but they were rare. In retrospect, though, it would have been nice to have had the same number of sessions spread out over 4.75 days instead of 3.75 -- it would have allowed for some more time in the hands-on labs, given people more time to connect with each other, and eased the hectic pace of the whole event. But I'm not complaining; my overall experience was fantastic.
My general impression of the sessions was that they pretty much hit the sweet spot in terms of content. With this much new technology, it's easy to spend too much time on overview material degenerate into marketingspeak. It's also easy to err on the other side and present too much technical deatil without giving the audience enough background context to frame the material effectively. I found the sessions to be the right mix of breadth and depth; I know the basic zen of the major technologies, and I've seen enough of the object model to start experimenting. As Chris Sells would say, I have not yet learned Whidbey or Indigo, but I have learned how to learn them.
One of my personal goals from this PDC was to meet some other members of the .NET community. Boy, did that ever get exceeded! There really is something to this blogging community. I really enjoyed hanging out with people like Ben Mitchell, Drew Robbins, and Alan Dean. It was good to see friends from my Chicago office like ever-entertaining Brian Jackson. I finally got to meet Rory, and got some free fashion advice too. I got to spend some quality time with some of the young, smart members of our community -- guys like Robert McLaws and Jeff Julian. And I even got to meet a few of my own ".NET celebs" like Brad Abrams, Doug Purdy, and Scoble. When there's that many people around who share a common passion for technology, you can't help but have a good time.
Speaking of community, I know one of the reasons that Microsoft puts on this event is to forge relationships with the developers that use their products and to build relationships with their customers. In the past, Microsoft has been accused of being a bit standoffish with the developers -- but based on what I saw in LA, the days of the Hermetic Order of the Blue Badge are behind us. The place was packed with 'Softies willng to talk, eager to answer customer questions (even the dumb ones), listen to customers describe their favorite-but-not-implemented features (even the crazy ones), and accept constructive criticism from their users. This week was a big win technically for us developers and a big win politically for MS.
Finally: to everyone I got to meet or interact with this week: thanks for a challenging and stimulating week -- we should do this again sometime :)
