If you haven’t heard by now, Microsoft is hosting a little event out in LA next week called “Microsoft Professional Developer Conference” (PDC).  Not everyone can afford this event or can take the time out to make the trip.  Microsoft has recognized this and is going to be streaming all of the keynotes  live.  They will also be recording of all the sessions and making them viewable online sometime after PDC.  However, many people like to hear the content, ask questions, and learn more.  To make up for this, Microsoft has also just announced the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) series. 

What is the MDC

“We deliver the core message, content and experience of the PDC in a one day, multi-track event to multiple cities across the United States”

The MDC is a day long, 12 city tour in the US that will deliver the key information from PDC in a cheaper, more concise, and streamlined form. MDC is a glimpse into the future of the Microsoft Application Platform. Some of the major areas of discussion will be Windows 7, Cloud Computing, Internet services platform, Silverlight, .Net additions, Live Mesh, and other PDC surprises.  You will miss much of the excitement, depth, and social aspects of PDC, but for the price and convenience, this event will be one that you won’t want to miss.

Even if you did attend PDC, you may want to register for a MDC event near you as well.  You can use this time to brush up on things you missed, ask new questions, or hear about how development and feedback has been going since PDC.

The main MDC website is: http://www.msdndevcon.com/

Registration

Registration opens Monday October 20th for all locations.  Space is limited, but each venue will be able accommodate between 300-1000 attendees depending on the location.

Register here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/register.aspx

Cost

Unlike some other community events, the MSDN Dev Conference is priced at $99.  It’s a lot less than the $2400 cost of PDC + travel, hotel, etc. The content alone is worth the cost, and it is a small price to pay for what is delivered and available.  It does include sessions, lunch, swag, social interaction, and other surprises.

Speakers

The speaker line up varies from city to city, but each of the sessions will be delivered by Microsoft team members, local Microsoft Evangelists, local community leaders, Regional Directors, and MVPs.

Tentatively, I will be presenting the Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services session at the Chicago event. More details about this will unfold in the coming weeks.

Agenda

You can view all of the session descriptions here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/sessions.aspx.

Dates & Locations

You can catch me at the Chicago location, but get out there and register for the location closest to you!

Open Spaces

Each event will feature a dedicated room for Open Spaces.  Open Spaces will run parallel to the main tracks, and will offer attendees a chance to dive deeper into a topic area or talk about topics not included in the MDC agenda.  At some conferences, the Open Space area is empty and often forgotten. At the MDC, thiswon’t be the case. The room will be manned by a coordinator with  local MVPs and other experts.

Social

• Facebook: join the group
• Twitter: follow the feed
• Flickr
• Delicious
• Twemes

The Zune offers a few command combinations that aren’t well documented. Below is a reference of these commands and how you use them.  If you are unfamiliar with the Zune button names, to the left is a picture with each of the 7 buttons labeled.

Comments:

• If you want to extend you battery life you can “shutdown” the Zune when not in use.  The device will naturally go in hibernate mode, but it will still use up some of the battery.  Shutting it down maximizes the battery life.
• Reformatting will delete all data on the Zune including any preloaded content.  However, it will keep whatever background you using, even though the original source image was removed.
• Some people have noted battery issues with the Zune.  These battery issues usually manifest with the device randomly rebooting while listening to music.  This issue can normally be fixed by performing a “Reformat” and making sure that the latest firmware is installed.  Version 2.3 fixed some batter issues, but the “Reformat” seems to do the trick to clean out any bad spirits that were introduced at the manufacturing plant.  This fixed issues that my wife’s Zune was having

As we get closer and closer to Microsoft PDC 2008, we keep hearing or finding all kinds of new news!  Just comparing new and old versions of the PDC site reveal so many new things from day to day.  It’s almost like an Easter egg hunt.  What will they reveal next?

Surprising registration still appears to be open!. I know a lot of people have to wait for many levels of approval before getting to sign up. If you are still mulling it over, just go ahead and register here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Registration/.  If you are not sure what PDC is or why you should attend, then check out this post: http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/18/microsoft-pdc-2008/

Four New Sessions

Since yesterday, the total number of sessions has jumped from 182 to 186.  I can’t pinpoint the exact changes in sessions as there are too many to track right now.  However, just looking at the difference in tags, the changes are:

+1 .Net Framework
+1 Cloud Services

Two tag additions doesn’t add up for 4 new sessions.  However, they adjust the tags so much that some sessions must have had tags removed to make up the difference.  Many sessions have multiple tags.

One of the newer sessions appears to be a Coding4Fun session staring Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman, Brian Peek, and Client Rutkas:

Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo’s Wiimote
Spend time with Coding4Fun authors as they walk through some DIY Development projects: TwitterVote, Wiimote, InnerTube, and BabySmash.

Two More Keynote Speakers

I haven’t seen a formal announcement about this yet, but if you look at the PDC speaker page, there are 2 new faces in the list: David Thompson and Amitabh Srivastava. David is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Online. While, Amitabh is a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft who is “responsible for the next-generation services platform”.  Is this services platform related to all of the S+S stuff?

That brings us up to 10 keynote speakers to fill in 5.5 hours of keynote time.  The PDC agenda page lays out who is speaking when.

Geneva Sessions

All of the “Zermatt” sessions have been renamed to “Geneva”.  Zermatt is the programming model for the STS and ADFS security metasystem known as Geneva.  And Geneva is one of the potential building blocks of something called “Zurich” which is a .Net-based S+S infrastructure.

Here were the Zermatt sessions:

“Zermatt”: Deep Dive
In this session we examine the architecture of “Zermatt” next generation identity technology, and how it can be customized and extended for advanced security scenarios. At the center of the discussion is the Security Token Service (STS), a core component providing authentication and identity services. Many applications will benefit from an embedded STS, and many scenarios will call for an STS that is built on a specialized user store.

“Zermatt”: Enabling Next Generation Identity
The security demands of applications continue to evolve in the face of compliance requirements, new online threats, and SOA and cloud re-engineering. See how to use the “Zermatt” next-generation authentication framework and services and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Find out how to use “Zermatt” with ASP.NET, WCF, Active Directory, and Windows CardSpace.

Here are the new Geneva sessions that replaced them:

Identity: "Geneva" Deep Dive
Examine the architecture of the "Geneva" next generation identity server and framework and how it can be customized and extended for advanced security scenarios. At the center of the discussion is the Security Token Service (STS), a core component that provides authentication and identity services. Many applications will benefit from an embedded STS, and many scenarios will call for an STS that is built on a specialized user store.

Identity: "Geneva" Server and Framework Overview
See how to use "Geneva" and the claims-based identity model to enable single sign-on, strong authentication, federation, and the ability to flow user authentication between applications. Find out how to use "Geneva" with ASP.NET, WCF, Active Directory, Windows Live ID, and Windows CardSpace.

There is also a 3rd Geneva session:

Identity: Windows CardSpace "Geneva" Under the Hood
Windows CardSpace provides a consistent, hardened sign-in experience that uses standard protocols and works with both thin and smart client applications. Learn about the features and architecture of the next version of Windows CardSpace.

All 3 of these sessions have the “Identity” tag and either the “Advanced” or “Expert” tag.

While doing my daily visits to the Microsoft PDC session list, I noticed a new session tag:

What is “Windows Strata”? The sessions with this tag are:

• A Day in the Life of a Cloud Service Developer
• A Lap around Cloud Services
• Architecting Services for the Cloud
• Business Considerations for Cloud Computing
• Datacenters and Resilient Services
• Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service
• Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale
• Scalable, Available Storage in the Cloud

Could this be the name or “codename” for the new Cloud OS that Steve Ballmer eluded to?  The name does have “Windows” in it, which makes us think it could be an Operating System.  And “Strata” could refer to the stratosphere which is associated with the sky and clouds.  Of course, the word Strata is really the plural form of stratum which is a geological formation, but that is just knit picking.

We might hear more before PDC, but we will know for sure at the end of the month!

There were a few other changes to the session tags too:

1. The tag “Dynamics CRM” has been renamed to just “Dynamics”.
2. The tag “Live Platform” has been renamed to “Live Services”.  New official name?
3. A new “Windows Embedded” tag was added.

Update 1:
I am not the only one who has noticed this: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081008/windows-strata-name-microsoft-cloud-os/ and http://geekswithblogs.net/kit/archive/2008/10/03/125633.aspx

Update 2:
[3:45pm EST 2008.10.08] The session list on the PDC site no longer lists “Windows Strata” as a tag.  Was this not suppose to go out yet?  Where they teasing or trying to trick us? There was a “test” tag out there for a little bit this afternoon.  It was probably a temporary tag while they got rid of the “Windows Strata” tag.

I was beginning to think it would never happen, but someone took notice out there, and over time my contributions to the community have mounted up to a Microsoft MVP award in Connected Systems for my relentless love of Wcf. It is truly quite an honor.  There are a lot of great MVPs out there, and I am not sure I deserve to designated like many of them.  However, I want to thank Microsoft and everyone out there in the community for this honor.  I had many people helping me along the way and giving me opportunities.  I especially want to thank my wife and family though for being flexible with my free time and allowing me to do all that I do outside of work for the community.

The MVP award “is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.”  The award is not easy to get and you can’t apply for it.  The award is based on your contributions for the past 12 months, and the award is granted for a period of 1 year.  After this time you may receive it again based on your contributions for that following 12 months.  Some of the rewards associated with it are quite nice such as the MVP Summit in Redmond, MSDN subscription, special downloads and training, etc.  The real gift though is being acknowledged for the love and dedication for the technology and community.  Most MVPs will probably agree that they do what they do out of a passion for these things, not to get any kind of award. 

There is not right or wrong way to get this award.  There have been many posts online about what it takes to get noticed.  For myself, I can’t tell you exactly what led up to this, but here are some of the highlights of my community involvement in the past year:

• Officer at IndyNDA (~100 attendees per month and over 1500 members)
• Blogging (over 100 posts)
• Wcf Forums (1800+ posts and Moderator)
• 6 Webcasts
• 15 Speaking Engagements across the Midwest
• Always looking for ways to help others embrace and understand Microsoft technologies!

I do these things because I love doing them.  Hopefully, I will be honored with this award again in the years to come, but if I don’t, it won’t affect how I feel about what I love to do.  Its going to be a very exciting year for .Net developers, and I am very excited to be part closer to the Connected Systems team which we will be hearing more about with Wcf, Oslo, Cloud Services, etc.

One other added bonus is the new title under my name in the MSDN Forums:

Here is a link to my MVP Profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/dan.rigsby

Today Microsoft listed 24 new PDC 2008 sessions, but there have been no formal announcement of these that I have seen yet.  This brings the total from 155 to 179.  They are promising over 200 total sessions.  We can expect a few more sessions to be announced at PDC (after they make the big announcements) and perhaps some other updates before then.

You can see the full session list here: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/sessions.aspx

If you haven’t yet registered for PDC 2008, the registration is still open.  If you have questions, read this post to see why you should attend.

I did a bit of analysis and here is a break down of how many new sessions were added to each of their tags:

+4 .Net Framework (4 total)

0 Ad Platform (2 total)
0 ADO.Net (3 total)
0 ASP.Net (10 total)

+1 CCR (1 total)
+6 Cloud Services (32 total)
+1 Dynamics CRM (4 total)
0 Entity Framework (3 total)
+3 Expression (5 total)
0 HPC (1 total)
0 Hyper-V (2 total)
0 Identity (8 total)
0 IIS (2 total)
+1 Internet Explorer (3 total)
+2 Languages (10 total)
0 LINQ (4 total)
0 Live Mesh (5 total)
0 Live Platform (11 total)
0 Office (4 total)
0 Oslo (5 total)
+2 Parallelism (9 total)
+1 SharePoint (4 total)
+2 Silverlight (13 total)
+2 SQL Server (16 total)
+1 SQL Server Data Services (7 total)
0 Sync Framework (2 total)
+1 TFS (4 total)
0 Unified Communications (3 total)
+1 Velocity (2 total)
0 Virtual Earth (1 total)
+3 Visual Studio (16 total)
2 VSTS (6 total)
0 WCF (6 total)
0 WF (8 total)
1 Windows 7 (5 total)
0 Windows Home Server (2 total)
0 Windows Mobile (2 total)
0 Windows Server (1 total)
0 WMI (1 total)
+4 WPF (9 total)
0 XNA (1 total)

Not surprises around these tags at all, but its nice to see where new focus is going.  Personally, I am disappointed that there wasn’t more added to “Wcf” or “Oslo”, but at least i have the “Cloud Services” to keep me busy. There was an addition of one new tag: “CRR”.  This is Microsoft’s Concurrency and Coordination Runtime. The session with this tag is:

The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime and Decentralized Software Services Toolkit
Get an overview of Microsoft’s CCR and DSS Toolkit 2008 and the technologies it contains for building loosely-coupled, highly concurrent, and distributed applications. Learn how the technologies are already being used and get a run-down of how to evaluate whether the technologies may be right for you.

Some of the new interesting topics to me appear to be:

Microsoft Sync Framework: Enterprise Data in the Cloud and on Devices
See how synchronization plays a pivotal role in transitioning to a managed cloud environment by creating a central hub of information in the cloud. Using synchronization, organizations

Logging, Diagnosing, and Troubleshooting Distributed Applications in the Cloud
Learn about the different ways of tracking down and fixing problems in services and asynchronous distributed systems with black belt techniques and patterns that make debugging a lot easier. Also, hear how some of the Microsoft services are run and monitored.

Modeling Data for Efficient Access at Scale
Learn how to model data for cloud services. Topics include: mapping common data idioms to tables, tuning data models for common access patterns, and creating efficient queries.

If you have been playing with SQL Server Management Studio 2008 and are modifying tables in the designer, you may run into this error:

Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made require the following tables to be dropped and re-created.  You have either made changes to a table that can’t be re-created or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require the table to be re-created.

Here is a screenshot:

In the 2008 , they have added a new option to prevent saving of changes that will require a table re-creation.  If you think about it, this is a good thing.  If you are running a production database, you want maximum performance.  If Management Studio needs to re-create a table to apply a change that means it needs to create a copy of the table, transfer the data, create the new table, move the data over, delete the old stuff, etc.  This can potentially be a major operation. 

However, if you don’t want this feature enabled or our just working with a development or test database, it is easy to turn off.  Just open up the Options window in Management Studio and go to “Designers –> "Table and Database Designers”, find the “Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation” option, and turn it off.

I have a new 10 min 12 sec training webcast up over adding REST support to a WCF application.  This video builds on top of the Understanding REST video.  If you have a decent understanding of REST, you don’t necessarily need to watch that video first, but in it I define the 4 tenets of REST which this video applies to WCF. This video also complements a recent presentation I have been giving called “RESTing on the Web with WCF”.

So what are you waiting for?  Head on over and check out the webcast!

The video available through JupiterMedia and can be viewed at http://www.internet.com/video/. Just look for the "Developer Video" titled "REST Support in WCF".

Direct links are:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1431564240/bclid1433966034/bctid1815668056

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.

I am going to repost a couple of blogs here, because this is a great continuation of the posts I have had over Microsoft PDC:

• Mike Swanson: PDC2008 Hard Drives, Services, Windows 7, and More
• Tim Sneath: What You’ll Hear at PDC2008

All of these posts stem from the latest Countdown to PDC video on Channel9 which was posts last night September 22nd.  These videos are usually time-boxed to 10 minutes, but this video was only 4.5 minutes and chalked full of interesting information.  The PDC 2008 Content Owner, Mike Swanson, announced what many of us have long assumed.  This will be the “Software + Services” PDC. PDCs in the past have had tended to have a focus or theme such as the “Longhorn” PDC, “.Net” PDC, etc.  This year we can expect a lot of content on Software + Services.

Software + Services (S+S) is a term coined by Ray Ozzie which is basically just a clever way of saying “local software and Internet services interacting with one another”.  It is really more than that though.  S+S is the merger of 5 very popular topics right now:

1. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) – Wcf, Biztalk, parts of Oslo, etc.
2. Software as a Service (SaaS)
3. Web 2.0 -  Social and networking collaborations, not just Ajax
4. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) – Adobe Flex, Silverlight, etc
5. Cloud Computing – Live Mesh, parts of Oslo, etc

The latest ArcReady series is focusing on S+S as well, which is where this definition came from.  It seems everywhere you look at Microsoft, S+S is being marketed more and more.  This will be the next BIG thing.  It is already a hot topic and in many ways is already a “BIG thing”.  As an SOA/Wcf/Cloud kinda guy, I am getting quite pumped up about what is to come.

The Countdown to PDC video also stated a few other things:

1. No matter what we thing, we will be surprised at PDC.  They have read the blogs and the speculations, but there are surprises.
2. Most big announcements are around S+S
3. There will be an announcement of a comprehensive services platform.  This will probably tie in big with Oslo and Live Services such as Mesh.
4. Windows 7 will get a lot more attention.  Right now there are 5 sessions on the PDC session list, but there will be over 20 when all sessions are announced.  I expect a beta or CTP release date, and all of those Microsoft commercials as of late are probably leading up to this.

The last big announcement in the video is how the bits will be delivered to the attendees”.  In the past, they have delivered the bits on CD and DVD.  At PDC 2005, they had 35gig of content that spanned 6 DVDs.  This year, they will have a lot more data.  So attendees are getting a nice “branded” 160GB USB2 external hard drive with all of the bits loaded on.  In many ways 160GB is small, but its a good size for storing your music collection or a backup of your primary OS and files.  The best part though is getting the data, demos, presentations, binaries, etc.  this will give us a chance to play with the new technology and hopefully spawn many new blog posts.  Here are a couple of pictures of the drive:

I am looking forward to the next session announcement list which should come up in early October if not before.  It will be interesting to see what they add.  I will do another synopsis like I did for the last session list to compare what areas are getting the most new additions and changes.

Registration for PDC is still open.  I highly recommend attending this event, if you can.  If you do make it out, drop me a line and maybe we can meet up.  If you can’t attend, at least watch the live feeds of the keynotes and watch for the session videos.   You really should understand what the future and direction is as a .Net developer.

If you are attending PDC, you should check out the videos on Channel 9 tagged PDC08 to see what all of the pre-announcements are.