So much for blogging at the PDC. Looks like the web server went tits up as soon as I left for LA. Oh well, here’s the short and curlies of it...

Landing in LA was made slightly more interesting than usual by not knowing about the bushfires that are currently enveloping swathes of California around Los Angeles. The surrounding clouds on our descent changed from the typical white to a dark, sooty orange for a few minutes and then to grey before the pilot chipped in that the burning smell was not attributable to anything connected to the plane and would people please stop panicking. Given that LA is the vacationing resort for Hell, surely the orange isn’t a massive surprise when descending towards the airport?

Sunday was pre-conf day dawning bright and cheery except for the eternal grey from the fires some 100 miles away. Sitting in the coffee lounge area, familiar faces abounded, some happy to stop and chat and other, Microsoftie ones looking a little stressed that their session partners hadn’t managed to get into LA yet, because the airport closed due to the fires. There is a very real sense that Microsoft’s first sold out PDC will be attended by only half those who have paid.

At the reception in the evening, it’s fairly obvious who the bloggers are at the conference. Black t-shirts shouting “I’m blogging this” abound. Some I even know. Don XML, Kirk Evans and Peter von Ootigen are on good form this evening.

Bill & Jim’s keynote is as good as any I’ve seen at a Microsoft conference. There’s humour, self-deprecation, forward thinking and demos enough for anyone. I doubt that the VH1 ‘Behind the Music’ homage will ever make it’s way out of Redmond for the public to see but damn it was good. Steve Ballmer making a monkey of himself is not new, but getting Sean Combs, Bill Clinton, and John Scully to guest is pretty cool. Even Bill G played it up and to great effect. Don Box and Chris Anderson came out to demo Longhorn code for Allchin’s part of it and even got him to write some as well, peering over his glasses as he typed.

Longhorn looks very cool, even if it is two or three years away. The frustrating thing about all of it - Longhorn, Aero, Avalon, WinFS and Indigo, is that it’s at the not-quite-blue-sky stage of things where you can see how the pieces will fit but not what the pieces will really look like. All the alpha bits were of the previous code milestone and have already changed. Talking to the Indigo and WinFS team, it’s plain that the object models there will be re-architected before beta 1 is even contemplated. Which means that concepts are important here and not code, even if it is split around. Don had four talks and his team ten or so depending on repeats. His were basically overviews of the technology and the rest were drill downs into its various aspects - serialization, integrating current distributed apps, security, p2p, wse, interoperability and so on. I suspect that the same was true for those following WinFS and Avalon. WinFS seems to have been well received across the board, although Avalon and its XAML markup language seems to have sparked a few flames from followers of XUL.

Shortening the timeframe, Whidbey (.NET 2.0) and Yukon (SQL Server) were also making debuts. Again still in alpha, although at a point closer to a public release than Longhorn, these technologies were well received but almost overshadowed by the ‘other Windows’ on show. PDC is always a space for previews, but it shows the mentality here that more are attending Longhorn looksees than Whidbey and Yukon, which are closer to release. Wonder what will happen in two years when Orcas (.NET 3.0 for Longhorn \ Yukon 2) shows up? Looks like both these two upcoming bits are waiting for WinXP Service Pack 2 before releasing a public beta 1 release. Given that there were a handful of SP2 talks here I think it will be fairly major, not only for the fixes but for the additions too. Security advocates start paying attention!

So many characters and personalities here. In no particular order then, I thank the following for making my PDC better

• Dave and Al - you can’t ask for better travel mates
• John, Gary and Julian - stalwarts of the Apress stand
• Neil and Amy at SAMS, even if Neil was delayed, he is the Doug Seven of the publishing world.
• Stephane, Curt and Karen at AdWes - for the party, the drinks and the general fun
• Don XML, Dave Lalande, Peter von Ootigen, Kirk Evans, and Ed Daniel
• Those who attended the birds of a feather session I haven’t mentioned already - hope you enjoyed it and sorry I kept slipping accents.

Last but not least, thanks to those of you who came to the books birds of a feather session which I hosted with Gary Cornell on Tuesday. I think it went rather well. See you in two years perhaps?

Got the good news from INETA today. They have approved my proposal for a Birds of a Feather session at the now sold-out PDC. It has had to be merged with Gary Cornell's session to make it in, but the topics were different angles on a wide topic, so the whole session should cover the following topics.

1. What’s good and what’s bad with the current slew of .NET v1 books
2. What’s good and what’s bad with the current publishing houses
3. What people want to see in the forthcoming Whidbey, Yukon and Longhorn beta books arriving in Q2 and Q3 2004
4. How someone should go about presenting their proposals for a book to publishers

My main fear at this point is that the whole session will be scheduled on the Sunday night before the conference has begun. The session will achieve a grand total of zero if it is I fear.

I’m also scheduled for a slot on PDC radio for the two different hats I’m wearing at the moment. Listen out on Monday at 12.45 for me in my independent author’s hat, promoting Programming .NET Web Services and advertising the BOF session, followed closely by me in my APress .NET evangelist hat spelling out the new groovy titles they are publishing in the next year or so.

PDC is booked, flighted, hotelled and generally sorted out. I somehow have a press pass for ASPToday, which means access to the press lounge as well, which is cool. ASPToday and APress will have a booth on the Exhibitor’s forum - Stand number 533 I believe, so make sure you come down and say hi. If I’m not there, there will be five of us manning the place for the duration.

If I’m not there, look for me in any session that begins with the word Indigo. It calls to me...

The attendee party at Universal Studios sounds a lot more inviting than the bar crawl down Sunset Strip I joined at PDC 2001. I still have no idea how I made it back to the hotel. I hope they turn Jaws off before it gets late. Waking up hung over on that little island in the middle of the Jaws pool is probably not out of the realms of geek possibility. Lots of folk lore points for sure.