PDC

I spent September 11th through the 16th in Los Angeles attending the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference. It was AMAZING!!! Computer programmer heaven. I took a few pictures with my phone. They're not the best quality, but they convey the message on the web. Here's the highlights:

I had a layover in Pheonix that started here ...




... and, 20 minutes later, ended here.




It was basically like programmer summer camp




13,000 programmers took over the LA Convention Center




There were about 150 classes




Fantastic breakfasts and dinners were provided for us




Amazing new technologies that you guys probably could care less about like LINQ, WPF, WCF, and WWF ... no, not World Wildlife Foundation or World Wrestling Federation, it's Windows Workflow Foundation. These are the things I should be playing with instead of writing on this silly blog.




LA turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. LA is beautiful. Southern California is beautiful. I really expected LA to be trashy, brown smog, dangerous, gangs, etc. etc.. I am sure that is there, but I didn't run into it. LA was sunny, 75 degrees, much more 'normal' than I expected.




Granted, I didn't get out a whole lot because I spent considerably more of my time in the convention center in class than I planned. I skipped only two sessions; one to catch the plane home and one to go running. The convention center and my hotel were very close to Dodger's Stadium, so I ran out to it, did a lap around it, and returned. That was a lot of fun. Most of the run was through a Hispanic neighborhood. At the time, I thought nothing of it. I felt perfectly safe. A little, middle aged guy even waved at me ... and he wasn't the only one.

I went out to dinner two nights with the fellas. We went to Sunset Strip in Hollywood both times. Loved it. It's a lot like Green Hills. It was insane real estate prices for old houses that, quite frankly, weren't that spectacular. I can imagine multi-million dollar celebrities living there and going to the grocery store and Best Buy and ... almost being normal.

On our way to ... somewhere ... we walked by the Whiskey a Go Go. Awesome! I wanted to go in but was overruled by the rest of the gang. That's where Guns 'n Roses got their start. It's holy ground to me.




I was RIGHT THERE hob-nobbing with rediculously smart folks; folks who WROTE parts of Windows or Host Integration Server. Bill Gates was there. He did a spoof of Napoleon Dynamite with the actual actor who played Napoleon. It was hilarious!

Bill rented out the Universal Studios theme park for us one night. All the food and drinks were free ... as they were at the convention center all week.