Why I want to attend the PDC 05

Five years ago I attended the famous PDC 2000 in Orlando. This was the PDC that presented .NET for the very first time to a crowd of 6000 attendants. It took me a month to really grasp the meaning of what had been shown to us. Not that the presentations were that bad. On the contrary, they were so full of information that it took a lot of reading, talking and testing with the Preview Version of Visual Studio .NET that was handed out to us. One of the great things about the PDC is that it is not one big commercial block but it is targeted at Developers (note the capital D!) that are really interested in those technical bits and bytes and long to see the more than two years ahead. I still remember Bill Gates telling us how hard it would be to sell .NET to managers because .NET is a Developer thing.

 

In all my activities during the last five years that focused on development, as a trainer, as a consultant and as a coworker I have benefited heavily of the quick start that the PDC gave me. As a trainer I have been able to explain to my students the upcoming new technologies, give them not just an idea of what’s going on but in-depth information on how things work. As a consultant I have been advising on migration paths, moving from strange and more familiar technologies to .NET and again: the quick start given by the PDC gave me the edge and confidence that I knew what I was talking about. As a colleague of a bunch of enthusiastic professionals I got to share the knowledge I gathered and kick start them.

 

During the last year I have been telling a lot of students, customers and coworkers about the emerging technologies: the CLR 2.0, VB .NET 2.0, C# 2.0, ASP .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, Avalon, Indigo, VSTO, Smart Clients, Team System (where does it stop…) Preparing for these has been quite a hassle; getting beta’s, reading the famous MSDN web-logs and watching webcasts.

 

I want the quick (but not dirty) start! I want to throw myself into week of getting information first hand. I want to join the Developers from around the globe that like to get their hands dirty.

 

I want to be Powered!