PDC and WinHEC: Backed Up and Back on Track
As
RDN Industry Editor Barbara Darrow
reported
last week, the
Microsoft
Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is back on the schedule, after
being postponed from its October 2007 date. The conference is now scheduled
for Oct. 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles.
The announcement comes a week or so after Microsoft announced a delay for another
developer-centric show: the popular WinHEC hardware engineering confab. WinHEC
has been pushed back six months to the fall of 2008. Microsoft has yet to determine
the exact date and location.
Developers can expect the new shows to herald another busy period of assessment
and review, as Microsoft trundles out beta and alpha versions of new technologies
and frameworks. Among the key technologies I'd expect to draw an audience at
PDC is .NET Framework 4.0.
Some, like reader Juan Foegen, are looking forward to another crack at PDC.
"PDC has been quite valuable to me in the past. Most conferences offer
little in terms of changes to MFC/C++. [From] what little I read, there are
a lot of exciting changes done for the C++ world and about the only conference
that covers any of that is PDC," Foegen wrote. "PDC is usually a conference
looking several years ahead, but most of us could use help just catching up."
Others, like independent developer Michael Drips of Folsom, Calif., are less
concerned "If you're a developer and already involved with MSDN, etc.,
those shows are just bling now. It's not like it was 10 years ago when they
popped out a beta that only a few people had heard of," Drips told RDN.
"PDC's becoming much more like Tech-Ed -- you go to learn stuff. I don't
know of anyone in the development community who looks forward to PDC anymore,"
Drips concluded.
Are you looking forward to PDC, or is it a conference whose time has passed?
E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 12/12/2007