Why You Want To Book Your PDC2008 Ticket NOW...

PDC2008: Microsoft Professional Developers Conference If you're into any of the technologies that this blog covers, you'll be mad if you miss the Professional Developers Conference this year. It's actually been three years since our last PDC, so we're overdue! I'm really excited about all the things we're going to be covering at the PDC this year: those of you who have attended the conference in the past will know that we only run a PDC when there is major news to share, and we've got some killer content this year. Registration opened yesterday, so now is a good time to get ahead of the crowd.

We keep most of the session titles under wraps until the event starts - this is a future-orientated conference, after all. But even from the session abstracts we've posted so far, you'll see sessions that cover the Live Mesh, Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7 (including details on how to program for the multi-touch feature we showed off this week at Walt Mossberg's D conference), as well as really hardcore deep-dive sessions on topics like the internals of the Silverlight rendering pipeline and our internal usage of Team Foundation Server.

But there's one other thing that has me salivating about the PDC as a WPF developer. Jaime Rodriguez (content owner for the pre-conference) has secured none other than Charles Petzold to deliver a one-day session on WPF. Charles Petzold! If you've been living on Mars for the last twenty years, Charles is a titan of the Windows programming world, having written several seminal titles, including no less than two books on WPF. Indeed, Jeff Atwood describes him as "the guy who put the h in hWnd". Charles is a hero of mine - he writes concisely, precisely, knowledgeably and articulately. I remember bringing a stack of copies of his first WPF book to a team meeting; the product architects were as eager to read his verdict on their platform as a Broadway theater director is to see the early papers after opening night.

Charles isn't one of those speakers who seems to be permanently on the conference circuit - in fact it's pretty rare that you get the chance to see him "live" at all, even though he delivers some amazing lectures when he does present. This is a unique opportunity that you just don't want to miss if you're building your mastery of WPF. Here's what Charles wrote for the pre-conference abstract:

This session will go deep into WPF and explain the infrastructure and services that WPF introduces. Begin with a solid foundation in dependency properties. Advance to the retained-mode graphics system and visuals. Explore the layout model, routed input events, and data binding. Discover control customization with styling and templates. Finish the day with an array of powerful graphics facilities, including animation and 3D. After attending this code-heavy, few-slides session you will have all the great insights needed to develop responsive and dynamic WPF applications that are easy to build and maintain.

One day of Charles talking about WPF - that's worth the conference admission price alone!