I have arrived at my first PDC and it’s an awesome experience. The conference is huge and I arrived here for the registration and breakfast and met up with some nice guys.

LA Convention Center

I fetched my bags of goods which contained mostly magazines and a bunch of sponsor commercials. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday until the real bits (the hard-drive stuffed with goods) are released and revealed. The keynote on Tuesday morning will really be interesting.

As Pre-Con session I choose the Performance by Design, an area which I keep close. Nothing revolutionary was really revealed during this session, which took the whole day and a little more. I really like this enthusiasm that the presenters (Rico Mariano, Vance Morrison and Mark Friedman) had, they really made this, on the paper, boring session great. The mantra from the day was Measure, Measure, Measure.

Most of the stuff I was aware of, except for some nice tools that now is slipping out of Redmond. But even if you are aware of all this you need to practice it, which they gave some nice examples of; what, when and how to measure.

Here are some of the presented tools:

I always snapped up a few interesting spots for the upcoming .NET 4.0 framework:

  • Image verification will will be optional – no longer need to GAC every assembly?
  • Next framework version will contain “profiling in the field” – instrument your application for field profiling
  • Even better thread pool thanks to the parallelism

The day ended up with a nice SharePint at the Biltmore hotel, where I met some really nice SharePoint MVPs and developers. I had some fun when using Microsoft Surface when getting the directions to the hotel.

Microsoft Surface