PDC 2008 Sessions & hard drive

I just got a question from Dries which sessions I intend to visit during the PDC. Although there isn’t a final list yet and especially tracks and times are still missing, I do have some favorites. I’ll post the list below for no reason at all, just that PDC is going through my mind like 24 hours a day right now. Besides LittleBigPlanet by the way, although they are hard to match together. Anyway, the list is quite large and I hope I don’t have to choose between 3 or 4 sessions held at once.

I’m extremely interested in Oslo and the new programming bits, .NET 4.0 and especially the CLR and type advances and of course the next version of WCF with the new modeling extensions presented at PDC. I’m also interested in Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server and Velocity, Pex and some other stuff, but I won’t hesitate to drop those against the previously mentioned stuff. I’m looking forward to sessions from Don Box, Justin Smith, Nicholas Allen and of course Anders Hejlsberg on the future of C#.

Also, the ‘goods’ (as in demos, whitepapers, vpc images, etc) is an ridiculous amount to put on DVDs so they’re giving every attendee a 160GB external drive which is black and PDC08 branded. Awesome!

The list below is alphabetically, like on the site

  • “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience
  • “Oslo”: The Language
  • “Rosario”: A Sprint with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
  • “Zermatt”: Deep Dive
  • A Lap around “Oslo”
  • A Lap around Building Block Services
  • Access Control across the Building Block Services
  • Architecture without Big Design Up Front
  • Deep Dive: Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive Application in Microsoft Silverlight
  • Entity Framework Futures
  • FAST: Building Search-Driven Portals with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Silverlight
  • Hosting Workflows and Services
  • Microsoft .NET Framework: CLR Futures
  • Microsoft .NET Framework: Declarative Programming Using XAML
  • Microsoft .NET Framework: Developing RESTful Services
  • Microsoft Silverlight, WPF and the Microsoft .NET Framework: Sharing Skills and Code
  • Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with the Next Version of Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Project Velocity: Under the Hood
  • Securing Your Service Using the Federated Identity Services
  • Service Bus Building Blocks: Connectivity, Messaging, Events, and Discovery
  • SharePoint: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Extensions
  • Team Foundation Server: Cool New Features
  • The Future of C#
  • The Future of Programming Languages
  • Under the Hood: Advances in the .NET Type System
  • WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0
  • WCF: Tips and Tricks for Performance and Scale
  • WF 4.0: A First Look