Dan Rigsby - Coding Up Style

The Microsoft PDC team has been making news left and right. Four major announcements have surfaced today:

1. Mike Swanson announced that each attendee is getting a “pre-beta” copy of Windows 7.  We figured this would happen, but it’s always nice to see it announced.
2. Four new keynote speakers have been added to the lineup, to bring the total to 8 speakers, most of the additions are Microsoft VPs: Scott Guthrie (VP of .Net Developer), Bob Muglia (Senior VP of STB), Steven Sinofsky (Senior VP of Windows and Windows Live Engineering), and David Treadwell (VP of Live Platform Services) have joined the lined up.  Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Rick Rashid (Senior VP of Research), Don Box (Software Architect), and Chris Anderson (Simple Geek) round of the rest of the keynote speakers.
3. Two Symposia have been added to the last day of DPC.  Each symposium is made up of three related sessions.  They are:
   • Parallel Computing – A Detailed Look at How Multi-Core Architectures will Unleash Computing Power and Enable Innovation
   • Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground – A Practical Look at Architectural Challenges and Opportunities with Identity, Management, Data and Interoperability in the Cloud
4. 17 new sessions have been added to the session line up bringing the total from 138 to 155.

As usual, here is my break down of new sessions and how they affected the topic tags:

+1 Surface (1 total)
+1 Sync Framework (3 total)
+17 Windows 7 (22 total)

The “Surface” tag is new this round.  I wonder if we will see more in this tag.  We can certainly expect to see a couple of Surface machines around the floor at PDC though.  It is interesting to see how much hype they will bring to Windows 7.  At the last session announcement on September 8th, there were only 5 Windows 7 sessions.  With these new sessions, plus the addition of the new Keynote speakers leads us to believe that there will be major feature unveiling.

However, this wasn’t one of the usual session announcements.  I think they added these new sessions in response to Mike’s announcements yesterday.  We should expect another announcement of sessions in early October to bring the total up to close to 200.  There will be even more sessions announced at PDC after the big announcements have been made in the keynotes.

I know I keep saying this, but this PDC is going to be Legendary!  Registration is still open.   Do what you can to attend this event; you won’t be disappointed.  And if you can get out there the night before, meet up with me and others at Party with Palermo.