Microsoft PDC 2005
This year, the Microsoft Pakistan Developer Conference is being held at the Pearl Continental Hotel. The 3-day conference commences on the 13th and ends on the 15th of July. Guest speakers this year include Adnan Farooq Hashmi, Alexander Diacre, Arvinda Sehmi, Aseel Mansour, Hammad Rajjoub, Goskin Bakir, Nasser Ghazi, Richard Goh and Saqib Ilyas.
PDC 2005 will unveil unreleased technologies such as Visual Studio 2005 and MS SQL Server 2005 and provide a platform for the preview and discussion of the much anticipated operating system, Windows Longhorn, something I am personally very curious about.
ahan..tht looks interesting..
Man I wanted to be there this time :S just because of these two “Visual Studio 2005 and MS SQL Server 2005” but could not :(.
Yeah, I have been through the first two days. This time its worse than last year. The “software developers” for whom this conference is organized are treated like guantamo bay prisoners. There are security checks on every corner. I have to pass through the checks 10 times in a day. There are long queues to enter and exit the conference halls. The lunch and tea are very much disorganized with everybody complaining for shortage of tea and food.
The presentations are fairly good but arrangement is not. There is no alternate backup for power failure and when the lights go out, the presentation has to be stopped. Today in hall B the sound sysem was not working properly so a major part of the presentation was lost for those who were sitting in the end.
All in all, PDC is a good promotional attempt by microsoft and it also provides a chance of networking to the professionals, and some good food, if nothing else.
Worst of all, there was no place in the lunch area to even move a little bit freely. I did not go the 3rd Day because I was tired of all the security checks and drinking those tasteless cups of tea
Umer
Read more about Microsoft PDC 2005 at http://blog.pakpromo.com
Kashif, I agree with you on most of these flaws. The third day, I finally got a chance to attend a seminar in Ballroom B and we had power failure, Air Conditioning failure and then Microphone failure one by one. The food on the third day was much better, more variety, Thank God, however, when they announced near the end of the last session of the day that all should stick around because they would be giving away Xboxes, they got a bit more than they had bargained for and many professionals were truly treated like prisoners. Initially, they told all to discard of their cell phones, either in their cars or somewhere else, which caused a mighty uproar from those who had not come in their cars, myself included. Eventually they let us all in with cell phone. Apparently the fuss was because Mian Mohd Soomro was going to be the chief guest at the closing ceremony.