PDC 2005 - Day One Review

The keynote was interesting, exciting and exhausting!  The technology innovations and overall coolness just ran on for ages and became draining.  It was also a first opportunity for me to see billg speak for the first time which was an experience.  He had far less presence than I would have expected for a man of such remarkable success but was still an entertaining and highly informative speaker.

The highlights of the keynote for me:

• Seeing the upcoming Vista OS (they also have hands on machines to play with in COMMNET area - nice touch!)
• Getting a better feel for Avalon's (I mean WPF's) impressive capabilities with the Netflix, North Face and Microsoft MAX presentations.
• Seeing LINQ and the Gentle.NET (and every other persistence framework's) esque version of attribute-based O/R mapping that must have been "ObjectSpaces" at one point.
• Seeing the LINQ example become integrated with Indigo (I mean WCF) and ultimately Avalon (WPF)
• Noticing over 30 available wireless networks available in the presentation hall!

The most overused phrases of the day:

• "super excited"
• "super cool"

The best sessions of the day:

• Monad is just awesome - really well thought out and extensible.  Microsoft might be late to the scripting shell party but what an entrance!!
• Thinking about the user experience - Hillel Cooperman did a great job - I am firm believer in aesthetics *and* function!
• Stefan Schackow did a nice job on custom providers in ASP.NET 2.0 - much of the presentation could be summed up with the word abstraction and learning to extend existing object frameworks.  This said, I still think it is a worthwhile effort as many people are still just starting to figure it all out.

The exhibitor party was interesting - I got to hang out with my friend Steve Smith and meet Scott Guthrie (Microsoft) , Scott Cate (myKB) and Chris Page (MaximumASP).  The Microsoft Influentials party at the trendy LA club, White Lotus, was fun and I also met the Enterprise Architect for Dell - Brent Jackson and had an interesting discussion about TDD and how it is being used to further enhance Dell's software development practice.

Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of thycotic, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC.  Our product, myclockwatcher.com is a time and expense tracking system specialized for billable professionals built on ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server using Test Driven Development.