I'm headed home and am in a tired sort of jelly-like state after
4-days at PDC 2008. I
went in with high expectations and came away with those
expectations mostly met - for the first time in my relatively long
career of attending conferences. Umbraco Codegarden is the notable
exception - these rock!
All in all I'm impressed and thrilled with the direction of the
Azure
Services Platform and believe this has enormous
potential. If you've read my blog posts over the last year
you've no doubt noticed that I'm an enthusiastic booster of cloud
computing in general. To me, the offerings from Microsoft
evolve the platform to a more approachable level and open the door
to additional opportunities. I don't know if Microsoft's
platform will be the "best" platform in the end, but at this point
it is the most real platform. Obviously, if you're looking
for simple cloud computing virtual machines you have many viable
choices - Amazon AWS and GoGrid to name a few.
Interestingly, there was only passing reference to this type of
virtual machine resource from the Azure Services team. I'm
still not clear if this is part of the offering.
I had many terrific conversations with fellow attendees and
Microsoft attendees/speakers. I don't think I'll be at PDC
2009, but who knows. The breadth of technology covered at PDC
is tremendous...I think a year to digest, process and implement the
most compelling items after evaluating how they fit into/disrupt
the current technology stack is barely enough time. I expect
PDC 2009 will be focused on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 - certainly
important technologies. I am, however, planning on attending
MIX
2009.
Following is my take on the best and worst of PDC 2008, it's one
person's experience:
Best Sessions
- Asp.Net MVC Framework (PC21) video
- Making your app more Social (BB20) video
- A Lap Around Live Services and Live Mesh (BB04) video
- The Future of C# (TL16) video
You can see all of the sessions and videos here.
Highlights
- The 'aha!' moment with regard to the elements of the Live
Framework/Live Mesh/Azure (formerly known as Strata).
- Sketching a conceptual design for a distributed Umbraco cache
with the project Velocity team
- Making my first Mesh App and actually seeing it run in Live
Mesh and on my laptop
- Learning that Live ID will be a provider for OpenID
authentication
- Getting a better understanding of Microformats and the
available tools
Lowlights
- Keynotes - I find it hard it to believe that the keynotes are
for the developers in attendance and not for broader media/investor
appeal. While the keynotes do help set the context for the
rest of the conference, they are (in my opinion) hugely
disappointing.
- I saw no public presence of any of the very cool open source
support initiatives from Microsoft (CodePlex, Web Application
Installer, etc...). It's possible that I just missed these
given that scale of the PDC, but I was disappointed at the lack of
visibility.
See you at MIX 2009 and/or Umbraco Codegarden 2009.