I sat in the office yesterday with a beer in my hand watching the PDC2010 keynote. I have to say I preferred this to the option of a flight, jet lag and a less than comfortable seat in a usually overly cooled conference hall. With the Silverlight streaming the experience was excellent, especially as we connected an Acer 1420P to our projector/audio via a single HDMI cable and it just worked.
So what do you lose by not flying out? Well the obvious is the ‘free’ Windows Phone 7 the attendees got; too many people IMHO get hooked up on the swag at conferences, you go for knowledge not toys. They also forget they (or their company) paid for item anyway in their conference fee. More seriously you miss out on the chats between the sessions, and as the conference is on campus the easier access to the Microsoft staff. Also the act of travelling to a conference isolates you from the day to day interruptions of the office, the online experience does not and you will have to stay up late to view sessions live due to timezones. The whole travelling experience still cannot be replaced by the online experience, not matter how good the streaming.
However, even though I don’t get the ‘conference corridor experience’ it does not mean I cannot check out sessions, it is great to see they are all available free and live, or immediately available recordings if I don’t want to stay up.
The keynote was pretty much as I had expected. There were new announcements but nothing that was ground breaking, but good vNext steps. I thought the best place to start for me was the session “Lessons learned from moving team foundation server to the cloud”, this was on TFS, and obvious area of interest for me, but more importantly no real world experience to move a complex application to Azure. This is something that is going to effect all of us if Microsoft’s bet on the cloud is correct. Seems, though there are many gottas, the process was not as bad as you would expect. For me the most interesting point was the port to Azure caused changes to the codebase that actually improved the original implementation either in manageability or performance. Also that many of the major stumbling blocks were business/charging models not technology. This is going to effect us all as we move to service platforms like Azure or even internally host equivalents like AppFabic
So one session watched, what to watch next?