Monday:

• Arrive at SEATAC – 2:30pm
• Party with Palermo – 7pm-10pm

Tuesday:

• MVP Summit TweetUP / First Time MVPs Meetup – 7:30pm-9:30pm
• Insiders Party by Infragistics – 8pm-10pm
• Hoping to check out later: 1st Annual Tellago MVP Party – 8pm-12am

Wednesday:

• Solutions Architect: Product Group Evening Event – 6pm-8pm
• MVP Summit 2010 Edition @ Chez Neward – 6pm-10pm

Thursday:

• Attendee Party – 7pm-11:30pm

Friday:

• Need to be home for family commitment. Shuttle to SEATAC pickup at 10:40am.

Send me a DM on Twitter or email me if you would like my mobile number to call or text me next week.

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The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) just hit my MSDN Subscriber Downloads RSS feed. Go forth and download!

MSDN

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Wow! I hope that email in my inbox is not some kind of elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax. 

It’s an amazing honor to receive this award. I would like to thank Dani, Lindsay, my new MVP Lead Miha Kralj, and everyone who considers my blog a valuable resource. I will do my best to live up to the MVP status by becoming more involved in the .NET community. To start, I will be doing a talk on S#arp Architecture at Philly.NET Code Camp 2009.1 on April 18th. Be sure to come on out if you can! There is a great lineup of speakers and sessions.

I hope to see many of you at the next MVP Summit!

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The MSDN Developer Conference series has been making its way around the country over the last several weeks. The conference takes the best of PDC08 and boils it down to a one day event at a reasonable price – $99. On Friday, Washington, DC area developers got their opportunity to experience the event in Reston, VA. Since there is no Philadelphia event, I decided to drive south to Reston rather than north to New York City.

There was a Developer Dinner the evening before the conference featuring a Silverlight line-of-business presentation by Marc Schweigert and Pete Brown. Marc showed some tricks for data retrieval with the current feature set available in Silverlight, and then Pete took over and showed how future improvements in Silverlight are going to streamline the code necessary to perform data access. Pete and Marc did a great job, and the pizza wasn’t bad either. 

I was really looking forward to the conference, and I must say it did not disappoint. My biggest problem was deciding which sessions to sit in on. There were interesting topics and engaging speakers throughout the day. Ultimately, I decided on a language futures session with Kevin Hazzard, a Windows Azure session with G. Andrew Duthie, a VSTS 2010 session with Steve Andrews and an ASP.NET 4.0 session with Rachel Appel.

After lunch, I sat down and chatted with Kevin Hazzard about how he approached his talk, which was a meld of three PDC sessions on the .NET languages. I agree with his observation that when watching Anders Hejlsberg’s session on The Future of C#, you could feel his passion for the language. Kevin wanted to harness that energy in his talk, and I think he did a very good job of it. I also learned that he is working on a book about scripting languages & .NET due out later this year. Stay tuned for more details…

I was able to finally meet some other bloggers & tweeters like Jeff Fritz, Justin Etheredge and Christopher Steen. It’s nice to associate an actual face with the tiny icons in the interwebs.

I want to give special thanks to Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown, Kevin Hazzard, Bob Familiar, Rob Keiser, John McClelland (founder of Partner Huddle on Facebook), and many others for all their efforts. They all had their hands full with this event and also took some time during the day to chat with me a bit. I had a great time on Friday and picked up a few tips and tricks along the way.

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My Xbox 360 NXE Avatar:

I didn’t see a ‘Soul Patch’ in the facial hair section… gotta log an enhancement request on MS Connect.

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I’ll be arriving in Los Angeles for PDC08 in two days. Be sure to catch my daily PDC articles on DZone’s .NET Zone next week! On a related note, if you’re a .NET blogger, and you’re interested in contributing on the .NET Zone as a writer, Zone Leader, or by writing some .NET-related RefCardz, please stop by the DZone booth next week. If you can’t make it to PDC, drop me a line, and I’ll be sure to get you in contact with the right people. The folks at DZone have been an invaluable resource to the Java community for some time, and they are committed to delivering that same kind of value to the .NET community.

Here are some of the places/sessions where you can find me next week. Track me down if you want to say hello, chat, etc… I will keep this post updated as things morph and solidify over the next couple of days.

Sunday

• 11:58AM – Arrive at LAX
• 7:00PM-10:00PM – Party with Palermo

Monday

• 8:30AM-10:30AM – Keynote
• 12:45PM-1:30PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
• 1:45PM-3:00PM – The Future of C# (Petree Hall CD)
• 6:30PM-9:00PM – Partner Expo Reception

Tuesday

• 8:30AM-12:30PM – Keynotes
• 1:45PM-3:00PM – A Lap Around “Oslo” (Petree Hall CD)
• 3:30PM-4:45PM – “Oslo”: The Language (151)
• 4:00PM-5:30PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
• 7:00PM-11:00PM – Attendee Party – Universal Studios

Wednesday

• 8:30AM-10:00AM – Keynote
• 12:00PM-12:45PM – Microsoft XNA Game Studio: An Overview (501B)
• 1:15PM-2:30PM – “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience (151)
• 3:00PM-4:00PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
• 6:00PM-2:00AM – The Underground (I’m not the waitlist. So, I may be there if I get invited and have time.)

Thursday

• 8:30AM-9:45AM – Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex (403AB) (If I have time before heading back to LAX.)
• 12:50PM – Depart LAX

See you there!

(BTW – Is anyone else staying at Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza?)

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It certainly sounds to me like David Treadwell is equating Live Mesh to Windows in the cloud. Listen carefully and let me know what you think.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

PDC 2008 Keynote in 3 weeks. We’ll know soon enough.

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