This is Part 3 of PDC, if you missed Part 1 or Part 2 check it out
Besides Silverlight and Azure, there were some other good things covered at PDC. But first, let’s talk briefly about what wasn’t covered. Despite Windows Mobile 6.5’s recent release, there wasn’t a single session about mobile development. I can understand why. Microsoft is way behind in the mobile market, and I suppose they want to wait until they have more exciting news around Windows Mobile 7. Still it was frustrating not to have any options for those that have done some Windows mobile development. After all, there was a session dedicated to surface development, which hasn’t changed much in the past year or more, but yet not one mobile session despite the recent 6.5 release.
Surface had some interesting activity. The surface platform gained more exposure to the developer community with probably 10-15 Surface units scattered throughout the conference. The Surface units allowed attendees to exchange information through identity cards placed on the units. The application displayed tweets flowing by as if floating by in a slow stream, from which you could grab them out and look at a tweet individually. It was a very nice UI presentation.
At the conference the Surface team made the announcement the Surface SDK and emulator has been released from an invitation only download, to a download available to all MSDN subscribers. Also, the surface team announced that soon the surface toolkit would be available and work inside WPF and Silverlight applications. Thus allowing you to write your applications once and run on any touch platform, including surface. I spoke to one of the Surface program directors, but no word on when we may see a version 2.0 or new hardware. I think we may be unlikely to see much in the way of SDK improvements to Surface specifically, since the control sets for Surface, Silverlight, and WPF are merging. Any new enhancements will likely be centered around new hardware features, if any become available when the new units come out. The people I spoke with mentioned that the surface team is working on building units that are lighter, cheaper, and allow for vertical mounting. If I had to wager when we may see new surface units, I think we might see a new line of units sometime in 2010. Personally, I think Microsoft will need to release units at a lower price point if they want the platform to see any significant growth. The current units are $12,000 to $15,000. If Microsoft was able to cut that price in half, I think we’d likely see an explosion of touch based initiatives pop-up in both the enterprise and consumer markets.
Microsoft, as well as sponsors, had booths setup throughout the exhibitor hall. In my wandering around, I was introduced to a few offerings at Microsoft, and I’m very glad I took the chance to mingle.
msDev.com is a place for partners to get free training to help them be more prepared to sell and deliver Microsoft solutions. Feeling bad because you are a one person company doing independent consulting? Even you can be a Microsoft Registered Partner. I’ve been a Registered Partner for many years and I’m told msDev.com is open to all partners regardless of size.
While we are talking about the little guy taking advantage of programs, if you haven’t checked out BizSpark, DreamSpark, WebSpark or Empower, you should. If you are a small shop, not yet an entrepreneur, but want to be, or maybe you’re still a student, these programs are just for you. All of these programs help the little guy get the Microsoft software you need to grow your business for free, or at very low cost. The rules for each vary, and I admit I still haven’t take the time to see which one my company best fits into, but every small company, including those that are non-technical, should check them out. For example, BizSpark gives you access to a very low cost MSDN subscription, including a free Azure account. Like I said, I don’t have all the details, but if this isn’t enough to encourage you to go check it out, it is doubtful anything would.
PinPoint.com is another new program that I’m glad I took the time to learn about. Pinpoint is a marketplace of sorts to allow any company, but particularly the little guys like me to get exposure for products and services. I only had time to learn a little about PinPoint, but learned enough to know I should go back and learn more. One of the things PinPoint allows companies like mine to do is to list products and services I offer in a searchable market place. For example, if I want to sell the Microsoft Surface application I built, but don’t have the time to build and ecommerce site, and do all the SEO work so people can find it, I can list the product on PinPoint. Additionally, the PinPoint folks hope to have full ecommerce functionality available soon, so they can process all of the “Check out” work and simply drop the funds in my account for each sale made. They couldn’t say when the Market place would go from an index to searchable products and services, to a full blown ecommerce marketplace, but “soon” indicated to me it won’t be long.
Codename Dallas (
http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/Dallas) is a new initiative that could provide major impacts to a variety of applications. If I understand it correctly, Dallas is an initiative to expose volumes of data in a standardized format for discovery and retrieval. Dallas will be a clearing house of large datasets, both public (free) and subscription based data. There was mention of how Dallas helps to accomplish one of President Obama’s goals to simplify the sharing of data to both grow innovation and reduce the cost of our everyday information needs. For example, Dallas exposes free datasets to review census demographics, real estate data, and mapping resources, among many others. All data is retrieved in a standard format. The idea is that if you as a developer build a process of retrieving and integrating with one set of Dallas data, you are now ready to integrate with all other sets of Dallas data. No longer is there a need to build an entirely different interface for every data service you want to use, thus shortening the time and reducing the cost of information sharing. At the time of this writing, there were 73 dataset available on Dallas.
Finally, I’d like to share some general opinions of PDC overall. First, Microsoft shocked everyone by giving every attendee a free Win 7, touch enabled laptop. I’m sure PDC 09 will live on in stories for many years as the year of the free laptops. The networking at PDC was very good. But networking only works if you “work” it. As an entrepreneur, here are some tips I’ll share for networking at a conference. First, bring twice as many business cards and you hope to give out and carry them where they are readily accessible. Don’t put them in your wallet, have them ready in your pocket. Have a memorable story you can share with anyone, and use that story to remind them who you are when you follow up. For me that was easy. I’m the leader of the Twin Citites Silverlight User Group. That is relatable to everyone at the conference, and everyone knows what it means. If you get a card from someone, write on the back what you talked about as soon as you walk away. If you didn’t get a card, make a note the person’s name and how you can find them. Follow-up with everyone you can via email after the conference, if you can reference something you talked about and leave an opening for them to respond with a reason to stay in touch. Often this will mean that you offer them your assistance with any of their efforts. For example you might offer to share any advice or code samples for a project you found out they are working on. If you connected with a speaker, author, or evangelist, offer to connect them with someone in your network, assuming you have a network that may offer some value to them. As my last bit of networking advice, I’ll share my best trick for finding people you want to connect with. Being from the Twin Cities, and wanting to connect with anyone else I could find from Minnesota, I wore a Minnesota Vikings shirt the last two days of the conference (I only have two). By doing this, I dramatically raised the potential for finding other people from Minnesota, and it worked. It only took a single thumbs-up from a passerby for me to engage that person and start a conversation, “Are you from Minnesota?”
I hope you found value in this PDC summary. Hopefully, I’ll have time to post additional and more detailed discussions and code samples for the new technologies announced at PDC in the upcoming months.