Talks I want to see @ PDC

don-box — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:17:00 GMT

In looking at the agenda for the event, here are some talks I'd really love to crash:

Oslo: Building Textual DSLs - lots of geek porn appeal, and if internal usage is any indication, a highly addictive technology. I predict this will be the World of Warcraft of 2009.
Intro to F# - I spent a month living in F# early this year and had a great time. I'm dying to hear how Luca has made the leap from OO to functional programming.
ASP.NET and jQuery - OK, so the title on the details page doesn't match, but if this is a session on how MS is going to integrate jQuery into the arsenal of .NET devs, I want to hear it.
The Raymond Chen talk - Despite being a former columnist for MSDN Magazine (hi Joel), I like unmanaged code too and would love to see what we're doing in the land of HWNDs.
Steve Marx codes - If you want us to run your code in our cloud, go see this talk. Period.
Vasters on messaging services - If you want to run your code at your place but want us to help wire it up to the rest of the world, go see this talk. Period.
Dharma - to hear Dharma talk about his work is always refreshing, and the stuff he's been doing is pretty compelling.
The New XAML Stack - We're getting a XAML stack in .NET 4.0 that spans all of our technologies. No more XOML!
The UAC talk - OK, call me selfish, but I really want everyone to write apps that work for standard user accounts. Nothing would please me more than if we had to repeat this talk 3 times due to overflow problems in the room.
Miguel in blue - no longer relegated to ad hoc hallway presentations or using nearby hotel rooms, Miguel is donning a standard issue blue Microsoft speaker shirt, applying the Silverfox powerpoint template, upgrading his laptop to Windows 7, and giving a sanctioned PDC talk that even Richard Klees would approve of. OK, so I'm sure one or two of those statements isn't true, but I need to see it with my own eyes.

Naming the Baby

don-box — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:57:00 GMT

I've been working on "Oslo" for quite a while now.

Like "Oslo" itself, several of the major pieces of "Oslo" have placeholder code names that will be replaced with the actual names we'll brand the product with.

This makes writing titles and abstracts for PDC talks especially challenging. We can't use the internal code names, because they're not long for this world.

We also can't use the actual product names, because we don't have a vetted set of names. Even if we did, the marketing and PR folks want to do the "reveal" in a newsworthy session or keynote, not in a random update to the PDC registration page.

That means that the titles and abstract have to use vague adjective-laden terms, which is surprisingly hard to make sound understandable let alone compelling enough to want to attend.

For example, rather than just using a title like "Foo" Under The Hood or Programming "Bar", we wind up writing things like The Tool for Writing Declarative Applications Under The Hood or Programming a Framework for REST Information Retrieval and Update.

FWIW, this is standard operating procedure - we had the same challenge in 03 with WCF and in 05 with LINQ and WF.

With "Oslo" its harder, as there are several significant (and separable) technologies (so we have more names to come up with) and we've not yet found the right terminology/adjectives that efficiently convey what we're doing.

I can give a pretty accurate picture of "Oslo" if I have five minutes to talk or 1000 words to write - we still haven't found the perfect meme.

Fun times.

Don Box's Spoutlet : PDC

Talks I want to see @ PDC

Naming the Baby