This is getting bad. I'm not even attending PDC this year and I'm already suffering from information overload! Near burnout at this point. I mean, how am I supposed to get any work done with all of this new stuff being thrown out there.
Though, I really like what Microsoft is doing this year. More of the content is being delivered online for all the world to see. Not that it is a good substitute for actually being at PDC, but for those of us not so blessed to be there: it is better than nothing.
Where to get information about what is going on at PDC? Well, MSDN is the best place to start. There is a page there dedicated to the PDC and all of the technologies being unvieled.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/
And there are quite a few. Plus some old standards, like Office. You need to watch Bill Gates's Key Note address. Really, you do. Office got a major UI redesign (think no menus, and an expanded toolbar that looks like a tab list).
The next best place to look for new stuff: Channel 9. They have videos on Sparkle (shows what Microsoft has in mind for next generation UI), SharePoint, IE7, and a lot of other stuff. Actually, Channel 9 videos has an RSS that I subscribe to and check on a regular basis anyway.
After that: Microsoft Blogs -- http://blogs.msdn.com/
This is the best place to find new information about LINQ right now...but it is still kind of ambiguous to me right now. I understand what they are trying to do, but it is some pretty technical stuff (integrating SQL into your normal programming language -- C#/VB.NET), and I'm missing a boatload of details on this one. Oh well, this one isn't coming out until C# 3. So I've got some time.
That is the real confusing part. Microsoft is introducing a lot of new technologies, but I have seen any timelines for them. I expect some of them are coming soon (this year) but others are going to be a while (1 to 2 years). But I can't always tell which is which. And, as always, Microsoft isn't saying how much we can expect to pay for some of this new wizardry. We are just supposed to be happy it is out there (Sparkle is a prime example of this).
Oh well, time will tell.
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