As some of you might know, PDC 2007 is happening in karachi on 19th and 20th June, today happens to be the first day of the event. Frankly, i was looking forward to some of the topics mentioned in the agenda here
My first was PDC 2005, which was really quite good with speakers like Rafal Lucaweicki and Clemens Vasters, at that time VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 was to be released, so there was tons to learn from it. The list of speakers was amazing none the less and there were topics on domain specific modeling, sql server reporting services and even Avalon. It was truly inspiring, after that I kept following blogs of some of the technical leaders in the market.
Unfortunately, that was probably the last good PDC there ever was, I get the feeling that PDC has been going downhill ever since, the number of professional speakers are minimized and so is the list of topics.
Today I attended the first day at PDC 07 arranged at PC hotel, It started off by waiting for the chief guest IT Minister Leghari to arrive, which in keeping with tradations here at pakistan arrived a full hour late. eventually he arrived and the ceremony was kicked off with a speech from the minister and plaque award ceremony.
Plaques were given to all sorts of people, including a guy who wrote the new urdu dictionary and a bunch of other people who's achievements were not explained and other irrelevants from the developers conference. Probably IT minister thought it would be a good idea to get rid of all pending plaque presentations at the PDC 07 event, may it be relevant to the developer conference or not
Finally we got to the tea break an hour late, on our way back we were handed an updated schedule. On close examination of the schedule, the session on Architecture "decoupling business logic from services" which I was planning to take was removed from schedule without any explanation!
we decided to take Goksin Bakirs presentation on developing with windows Vista enchancements, the presentation was nice but it was an overview level, pretty much of which I already knew
then we had the (mis)managed lunch. One of my friends had to go on a hunger strike lol!, cuz he had'nt filled his plate enough the first time, after the food as gone the waiters refused to fill it up. By the time people moved to desert, all the spoons had disappeared
after that we took the second session on "using LINQ to retrieve business data" by Zia khan. Zia khan is more of a business entrepreneur than a tech guy, but he gave enough of an overview to get started. Again there wernt any live sessions or demo's , just some architecture slides and some code in slides. You would be better off by downloading a quickstart tutorial on LINQ
the last session we took was "using the right technology : Bizztalk, SQL Server, Sharepoint etc" by Naveed bajwa, the guy was a pretty horizontal tech guy, but the presentation could use some work. He explained some basics and discussed certain scenarios and asked the audience what technology can be used under the scenarios. Unfortunately, the scenarios were bland 2 liner requirements statement and without depth except the last one. It was hardly a topic for PDC, he could have been better off by writing a 2 page article on it
I really hope that tomorrows sessions are better, otherwise if we keep getting useless topics and inexperienced MVP speakers, PDC 07 would be loosing the last of its professional audience. Ever wonder why we have a Professional Developers Conference in the world all over and here its called Pakistan Developer Conference ??
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