Update: Added links to all downloadable videos
If you are not living under a rock, probably you know that yesterday (October 28th) the PDC2010 started. This year’s format is quite different from the other years’ one: just 2 days, hosted inside Microsoft Campus, all sessions (not just the keynotes) available live and some sessions have been pre-recorded to give more content than it could fit into just 2 days. And they developed a great website so that people could watch the whole conference from home (of course, they wouldn’t get the WP7 phone).
The main themes
The main themes of this year where:
- IE9 and HTML5
- Windows Phone 7
- Cloud
What really shocked me was to hear Steve Ballmer saying that:
“HTML 5 is the glue that ties all of these things together”
And not a word as been said about Window 8, or Silverlight outside of the context of WP7 development. So it seems like this time they are getting it right.
My hand picked sessions
I’m not interested in all the three themes, but just some of them. Here is the list of the sessions I’m interested in (with links to streaming, download and powerpoint when available).
- Keynote with Steve Ballmer and Scott Guthrie demoing WP7 tools (streaming, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- Things I Wish I Knew Three Months Ago about Building Windows Phone 7 Applications (streaming, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- Optimizing Performance for Silverlight Windows Phone 7 Applications (streaming, ppt, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- 3-Screen Coding: Sharing code between Windows Phone, Silverlight and .NET (streaming, MP4 H, WMV H) – a future feature of Visual Studio vNext
- Making Money with the Windows Phone Market Place (streaming, ppt, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- WP7 Dev/Apps Q&A (streaming)
- WP7 Controls Q&A (streaming)
- HTML5: More than Just HTML5 (streaming, ppt, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H) – by Giorgio Sardo
- The Future of C# and VB (streaming, ppt) – Let’s see how C# 5 will be, including the Async keywork
- Deep Dive into Razor (streaming, ppt, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- WebMatrix: The Web Reloaded (streaming, MP4 L, MP4 H, WMV L, WMV H)
- ASP.NET + Packaging + Open Source = Crazy Delicius (streaming, MP4 L, WMV L, WMV H) – by Scott Hanselman, will most likely talk about ASP.NET MVC 3, NuPack, Razor and all the opensource libraries that complement web development on .NET. The only session about ASP.NET of the whole conference.
The online video experience
Having the possibility to watch all the sessions as they happen is invaluable, but I think it is ironic that in the keynote Ballmer says “HTML5 is the future”, and then they build it with Silverlight.
I also think this application shows how not to build Silverlight applications if you want to put them on the web:
- You cannot select any text, not possible to do copy and paste (I had to copy all the titles manually to make my list)
- The url always shows: http://player.microsoftpdc.com/. The url doesn’t change when you go to the various sessions or when you go the PDC guide. And the links to the sessions are some shortened url you can copy if you want to share the session you are watching
- If you want to copy the url of a downloadable file you have to download it, go to the list of downloads in your browser, and copy the url it was download from. If it was a normal web page, all you needed was right-click on the link and copy url.
- Same problem with the links to external sites: you have to click on the link (which, btw, is opened in a popup windows that gets blocked) to see the url.
Don’t get me wrong, probably video players like this one are one of the scenarios where you might want to use Silverlight on the web, but please, do it web-compatible next time…
