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I've participated in several PDC's in the past, mostly as a speaker, but this year I'm helping to do some of the organization. Recently, I've been in a lot of meetings with Mike Swanson , a Technical Evangelist here at Microsoft. Mike is one of the key ring leaders in producing the PDC content. If you were ever interested in how the PDC gets pulled off and some of the thinking that goes into it, check out this video featuring Mike and colleague Jennifer Ritzinger. Read More...
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Jennifer Ritzinger and I have started a new show called Countdown to PDC2008 , and we just published our first episode on Channel 9. We’ve been recording an internal video series (of the same name) for about ten episodes now, and some fellow employees suggested that the format might also work for an external audience. So, we decided to try it, and we’d love your feedback! Specifically, if you have any questions about the conference, or if you’d like to hear about a particular topic on a future show, please add your comment to the post. We’ll do our best to address them. To keep things short, tight, and packed with information, we use an old skool analog kitchen timer. Yes, we know that it runs a bit fast, but you know what? We will abide, and “at the ding, we’re done”…even if we’re in the middle of a word. That way, even if we suck, we won’t suck for long. For astute viewers, the fact that we’re standing up and using a kitchen timer might even make this an Agile show. Okay…I’m just rambling Read More...
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[You can skip to the last two paragraphs if you’d like to offer suggestions] Here we are…one month later with the second post in a series about the PDC2008 Content Owner role. If you don’t know what a Content Owner does, I’d recommend reading PDC2008: A Day in the Life #1 for context. As mentioned in the prior post, one of my responsibilities is to coordinate and drive two meetings each week with many representatives from across Microsoft. The members of this team are critical thinkers who help define, create, and shape the content we’ll present at PDC2008 in October . But how do we select our content? How do we know which sessions make sense and which ones don’t? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that many Microsoft employees have an engineering mind-set, and we tend to want everything defined in terms of an algorithm (yes, I’m guilty too ). But when it comes to content, though we do have many measures and metrics, a bunch of smart people talking and arguing about what makes the Read More...
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The wait is over! The public PDC2008 site just went live, and you can now register for the conference (and save $200 if you register early). We've published a preliminary set of topics that represents only a fraction of the over 160 sessions you'll see at the event. Topics include software + services, Windows 7 , a deep dive on Silverlight graphics pipelines, Windows Mobile, extensible BitmapEffects and Pixel Shaders in WPF, how we use Team Foundation Server for our huge Microsoft projects, a new technology that makes it easy to build business applications in Silverlight, how to develop for Live Mesh , and more. It's brain busting content at its best. For $400 more, I'd encourage you to show up a day early and attend one of our pre-conference sessions . These are all-day-long, deep-dives on today's technology delivered by both Microsoft and recognized third-party experts. For example, Advanced Windows Debugging will be presented by Mario Hewardt and Daniel Pravat, the guys who wrote the Read More...
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As the PDC2008 Content Owner and a member of the Core Team, my days are filled with PDC-related activities. I thought I'd blog about some of these activities in a series called A Day in the Life . My hope is that I'll be able to post more of these as we approach PDC2008 this October . So, if you're interested in behind-the-scenes insights, keep checking back. First off, let me explain the Content Owner role. My job is to drive the themes, tracks, sessions, and overall direction of the content at the event. This extends to many other areas, including the keynotes, the pre-conference training sessions, the hands-on-labs where you can play with the technologies, the bits that we hand out (referred to as The Goods ), and the panels and symposia. Ultimately, we have role owners that are responsible for each major activity, and without them, there would be no way to pull of an event with the scope, size, and magnitude of PDC. It's definitely a team effort. PDC is a different kind of conference. Read More...
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As the Content Owner for PDC2008, I'm now a member of the Tier 1 Events Council at Microsoft. This is a group that meets a few times a year to share ideas and best practices around our largest events (like Tech·Ed , MIX, and PDC). We met all day today and covered a number of great topics. One of our sessions was titled Environmentally Sustainable Events Initiative , and it was presented by Gina Broel and Jessica Ludders. We discussed what it means to be a "green" event based on the Green Meeting Industry Council . According to the council, a green meeting incorporates environmental considerations to: Achieve economic and strategic business goals Minimize or eliminate environmental impacts Positively contribute to the environment and host communities We love to measure, benchmark, and assign metrics to just about everything we do at this company, and environmental sustainability is no different. We've looked at things like the amount of waste generated by our events, the amount Read More...
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If you read my What Do I Do post, you'll know that I'm the Content Owner for this year's PDC 2008 in Los Angeles. MIX08 is behind us, and I've just recently transitioned away from my Web GO role. This means that I can now focus 100% of my time and attention on our October event. It's going to be fantastic! One of the many responsibilities I have as Content Owner is to create the master schedule for the event. This is the schedule that tells you which session is in which room and at what time. For PDC 2005, we delivered over 200 sessions at the conference, not including repeats (we run repeats of popular sessions that are filled to capacity). Because PDC is where we talk about the future of Microsoft's platform, all of the content relates in some way to our overall strategy (which is typically delivered during big keynotes and general sessions). This means that some sessions need to be scheduled ahead of others to provide foundational and prerequisite knowledge. For example, a 200-level Read More...
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You’ve probably heard that next week’s MIX08 conference in Las Vegas is sold out. But do you know what that actually means? Does it mean that we decided months ago to cap registrations at an arbitrary number of attendees? Or perhaps we picked a mystical date? Or a financial target? Or the cynical among you might believe that “sold out” is just a way for us to create buzz around the conference. It might surprise you to learn that it’s none of these. When we organize a conference like MIX08, one of the first tasks is finding a city that can accommodate thousands of attendees and the large support staff that it takes to run a big event. This is more challenging than you might think, because we have to consider things like meeting room layout, space to accommodate large sessions, the number of people we can fit into the ballroom for lunch, how many hotel rooms are available, opportunities for evening events and activities, weather, transportation, etc. After applying Read More...
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A few days ago, I received the following e-mail: Help me out here. I've been reading your blog off and on for years and I can't figure out what it is you do. Your obviously involved with the PDC and MIX conferences, you send a lifesize cardboard cutout of yourself as your resume, you've made a plug-in for Illustrator and a converter for Flash files (which rock BTW), you take amazing photos, you implement seam carving in your "spare time", you write Tivo gadgets, you taught me about continuous integration with your orb article, your article on code review was mandatory reading in one of my classes, you read quite an collection of books, you seem to be pretty good at design considering you claim to be a geek, you build small arcade machines, you counted to a freakin' million, you worked with Tom Skerrit, you write music, you build medical software, and who knows what else. Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. :) I just read through your old posts cuz I couldn't remember all of this! Just what Read More...
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We've extended hosting for the PDC05 post-show sessions through June 30, 2006. Hosting was originally Read More...
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