Desmond File

Blog archive

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


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

    The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.

  • Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

    Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.

  • Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

    Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.

  • AdaBoost Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.

  • Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

    Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.

Subscribe on YouTube