First day at the PDC 2009

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After waking up at 5:00 in the morning for the third night in a row, Tuesday was the first day of the PDC conference itself. As is common for any Microsoft conference, the first keynote is usually a bunch of marketing stuff, and this one was no different. Nevertheless, if you have watched it from the PDC site, you will agree that this whole cloud thing cannot be ignored anymore. I have to make sure I'll attend one of many cloud sessions in addition to all the architectural and Silverlight talks.

The keynote was followed by a talk by the team-formally-known-as-the-Oslo-gang, Chris Anderson and Don Box. It started with a short intro on the Entity Framework 4.0 which helped me confirm the ideas I've been forming for my next SDN talk. Right after that, they introduced the OData protocol that allows virtually any application and framework to exchange data. And while doing that, they used Quadrant as a 'nice visualization tool for showing data'. I really wonder what happened with all the Oslo tools and frameworks. One cool thing about OData is that you can retrieve the metadata in EDMX-format from any OData-compatible data source, even a Sharepoint list. By simply providing the URL to the data source in the Add Service Reference dialog of VS, it will generate code in similar way the Entity Framework does for you now.

The remainder of the day was filled with an additional EF4 session which didn't reveal anything new for me, some tips and tricks on Blend 3, and some nice demos showing some of things they have in mind for the next version of ASP.NET.

The official conference day was finalized by a moderate party in the main lounge amongst the many exhibitioners such as DevExpress, Infragistics and Telerik. Thomas was tired, but Ronald and I concluded the day with a drink in the Saddle Ranch at Sunset Boulevard.

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