The plan journey was 11 hours there in cattle class… not particularly enjoyable however I did get the chance to watch lots of movies on the journey that I had wanted to watch for a while. The flight back was less than 10 hours, I think the pilot had is foot planted :P Only there was lots of turbulance, every time nature called, the plane would hit a whole new patch of turbulance. It was very disconcerting.

I think this trip solidified the fact that I am not a travelling person, it took me 4 days to get over the jetlag, the waking up in the early hours of the morning wide awake. To compound the problem the hours were long, I would get up about 6:30am to get on the bus for 7:30. Spend 10 hours in the convention center, then get back to the hotel for an hour before diving off out for the evenings event.

To make things worse, my laptop would not connect to any of the wireless connections available at the convention center so for half the trip I was carrying at least 5kg of dead weight. The only useful job the laptop played was to charge one of my colleagues iPhone as he forgot to bring his mains charger and his laptop bricked itself.

We arrived in LAX late on Saturday. Sunday was the pre-conference sessions, I went to the sessions on Silverlight 2 presented by Jeff Prosise. It was very good and there were a few tips that I picked up however much of it I had already learnt over the previous months.

This set the precidence for much of the conference, I had chosen most of the sessions on subjects that I already knew a little about, I believed that my knowledge would be improved by these sessions. However in reality they showed little more than I already knew, or could have found out using a search engine. As a result I begun choosing sessions on more complicated subjects which were more enjoyable. I was so nervous before the conference that I would be disgraced as not knowing programming very well, I still felt that I was a junior programmer. Going to this conference was a very good thing for me, my confidence has been bolstered and I know longer feel as if I am a junior programmer.

Monday morning they announced the cloud computing platform Windows Azure. Now, I can get pretty geeky but it really didn’t knock my socks off. I am not totally sure why, it could be the fact that I might not be able to get to play with it for a couple of years, maybe that it is something targetted at the enterprise and I like being able to acheive really cool stuff for free… cos im cheap :P

Another thing that they were pushing at the PDC was multicore programming, and what they are doing to start empowering the developer to easily make use of more cores.

The agile development session was interesting just to see how Microsoft do it or think how we should do it, and they showed off Team Foundation Server 2010. One interesting point was being able to setup source control policies, one policy they demoed was making sure the developer built and ran all the tests locally on thier machine which would be very handy at work. We do suffer from this sometimes.

They were also showing off thier new OS Windows 7, which on the surface looks like Vista but underneath they have made a lot of advancements. They are pushing the scalability and efficiency of this new OS. During one of the keynotes the presenter made a claim that it runs on a 1ghz 1gb RAM notebook very well. They also had machines dotted all over the convention center with Windows 7 on it, its quite impressive.

One particular session that jumped out was the improvements they are bringing in .NET 4.0 to with dynamic languages. To the extent that dynamic languages like python and ruby can talk to static languages like C# and VB and vice versa. This was very interesting, with the idea that you could build a library with a nice model in C# and consume it in python. There was no mention of PHP at all, but it would not take too much for mono to get up to speed and be able to do something similar.

Much of Wednesday afternoon I spent going around the Partnet Expo, talking to various people and picking up free stuff! Got quite a few T-Shirts, won’t have to go clothes shopping for another couple years now ;)

Most nights Microsoft had organised some evening events, my expenditure for the entire trip was very small. Tuesday night they had opened up Universal Studios just for the convention, and that was very cool. It was transformed for halloween. Upon entering, the streets were filled with smoke and dotted throughout were men in consume with chainsaws (without the chains of course) and occasionally they would start them up and rush into the crowd. I prided myself on not being able to react :P The only reason for that was that I kept my eye out for all of them, so I knew when a scare was coming, or where it might come from. Unlike my colleagues, I never jumped once. There was one occasion when we were walking down this sparesly populated street and there was this particular section heavily obscured by smoke. It was inpenetreble and upon thinking that there was someone hiding in there a man in costume rushed past in front me into the other guys and started his chainsaw. They scattered, it was so funny lol. The guy did come back to hassle me however since I can school myself, it wasy to walk off :P

The only other notable night was on Wednesday when the ISVs went to the J Lounge. Very trendy place, they have XBoxs out, and even a game of Rock Band projected onto the side of a 3 story building. There was lots of eye candy as a couple of Lakers girls there. Near the end of the evening they gave out various prizes, I won a $25 dollar Starbucks gift voucher, only problem was that I only had 14 hours in which to spend it before I was bound for home and much of that was going to spent doing things at the convention. I gave it to one of colleagues in the end who was spending a couple of extra days in America.

Overall the PDC was quite overwhelming at first, I think if I went again I would be better prepared, the only thing that would put me off is the flight. Now I am going to be depressed for a year or two before I can use all of this lovely new technology.