PDC 2008 Wrap-up

As usual, PDC 2008 was a great event. I had a chance to meet a lot of old friends (it’s been 7 years since I’ve been to a PDC- it attracts a certain crowd that only shows up there) and I’m happy to see that everyone’s doing well.

My IronRuby talk was the first day of the conference. It was a crazy mixture of many, many demos (9 in all) which showed:

- when and why you should create a new type in IronRuby using C#

- how to write a Visual Studio plug-in using Ruby

- how to build a unit test and mock object framework

- how to integrate Ruby scripting into your existing C# application

- how to build simple web services using Sinatra

Only one blew up (the last one) when I forgot to change the type name in my ironruby_mischief.rb file to the type that I created in the IronRuby libraries.

You can watch it on TV now (Silverlight required).

Brief Rant:

Session evaluations are a great way to give direct feedback to the teams. Sure, you can send email to the speakers directly, but session evaluations get circulated fairly broadly internally and are often used by management for future product plans. They are a great way for you to influence the way we plan and prioritize the work that we need to do.

But there’s really not a lot in it for you, the attendee, outside of maybe some personal satisfaction that you helped to influence the products that you use (that’s if you knew how influential they can be in the first place).

Here’s my proposal:give direct incentives for folks to fill out their evaluations. It can be something as simple as 1 eval == 1 ticket for a drawing for prizes at the end of the conference. The more evals you submit, the greater your chances for winning prizes that are donated by the sponsors.

You could do things like what Stack Overflow does: give merit badges to folks that provide quality feedback. Written comments are always preferable to just clicking on radio buttons, so you could earn more merit points by doing just that. The whole system is online anyway, and it wouldn’t be that hard to implement.

You could even do something simple like write 5 evaluations to get your conference T-shirt. That should significantly improve the response rate, considering what the awesome power of T-shirts are in the geek world :)

I don’t believe that this would skew the feedback in a significant way. Hopefully we’ll hear more from the ‘silent majority’ this way. For example, I had 245 people in my IronRuby talk and as of this writing, I only have 15(!) evaluations.

If you read this far (and you attended my talk at PDC) please click here to submit your evaluation. Apparently that link is some kind of one-time link. You'll (unfortunately) have to go to the PDC site and navigate to my session (TL44).

What I liked:

I loved the Big Room. It was a place where folks could gather to meet and mingle. Since I want to talk to customers at the show, I was happy to spend virtually all of my time in the Big Room talking to customers.

But there was one talk that I did attend: Miguel de Icaza’s awesome Mono and .NET talk. Horrible title – it really should be called “Awesome Mono hacks by Miguel and his band of merry hackers”.

Here’s the coolest thing that he showed:

Mono applications running on a non-jailbroken iPhone. Yes, you heard that right. For those of you who aren’t in the know about these things, the iPhone SDK prevents you from writing a JIT compiler through some kernel restrictions (you can’t mark a writable page as executable). It also prohibits you from writing an interpreter so that they can maintain their lock on application distribution via the App Store. So how did they do it? They made it possible to compile an entire Mono application into a single binary executable which gets signed via xCode and downloaded to the phone. This opens up some pretty awesome opportunities for using .NET as a platform for building apps that run on the iPhone.

He also showed a very cool C# REPL in action. There are some cool UI ideas from his REPL that are going to find a nice home in the IronRuby REPL :)

Lots of fun banter during the talk as well. Click here to watch it on TV (video not there right now at the time of this writing, but should be there soon).

I had a chance to meet a lot of folks, and once my talk was done, I decided to try and shoot photos of as many of my friends as I could. I’ll continue to upload them to my PDC 2008 flickr photoset as I process them on my laptop.

More later as I continue to collect my thoughts.