Ahh - I had such good intentions and lists of sessions to see but ended up talking with lots of people yesterday at PDC which is such great fun. I also picked up more swag for my lucky user group! After seeing Ray Chen's 10am session I went to the "big room" where the expo and track lounges are, just for a few minutes in between sessions, but I ended up in there for many many hours. At some point I headed back in the direction of lunch but never quite made it in - too many people to see!
I was happy after knowing Scott Cate as a .net user group leader and ASPInsider for a number of years, to finally get a great one on one demo of his MyKB product which enables companies to easily build and use their own knowledgebase in a very intuitive web user interface. The app can be hosted on the intranet or extranet. I am thinking of getting this into one of my client sites because there is too much knowledge lost when there is turnaround and I find that I am asked to add features into their applications that have been there for years.
I loved meeting Carter Maslan from Microsoft who has written a number of amazing concept applications for Windows Vista (well, when it was called Longhorn, still :-)).
I eventually ended up with Kate Gregory in a fun area where there's lots of tables and plugs and ethernet cables - and people keep passing through back and forth to the expo hall. While there I got to meet Sara Ford who I have talked with in email, but never met. Sara is a software tester at Microsoft and lives in Washington, but is from Waveland, Mississippi, which was hard hit by Katrina. She has blogged about it a lot lately. Her photo is on her blog so I recognized her when she was walking by. I was also happy to get a chance for a quick catch up with one of the coolest chicks I know at Microsoft, Marie Huwe. And I got a personal tour from programming goddess Susan Warren, of Vertigo Software, of Microsoft's new Digital Locker project, a centralized place where Windows users will be able to easily purchase software from a wide variety of manufacturers and retails and then keep track of their purchases as well as having quick (and, of course, secure) access to the software keys/serial numbers for them.
The real highlight of the day for me, however, was the Birds of a Feather session that I led, called Going Solo. I had worried that the room would contain lots of people hoping to go independent and then me - the sole resource of advice. But I was thrilled to find that the packed room was split evenly between those who are independent and those who were hoping to be. Not just packed, but there were even people out in the hallway looking in. We talked about how to get started, how to market your self, the importance of contracts and getting your ducks in a row professionally. I am a big believer in the importance of relationships for keeping my business successful and was happy that many of the other indies heartily agreed. I will be writing a separate post about the details of this session hopefully sometime soon (still catching up!).
After the BOF, it was fun to go watch the rest of the Channel 9 PDC Show Off videos. Mine had been shown at the beginning while I was in the BOF so I missed that. The most amazing one I saw was of a robotic ride at LegoLand Power Builder robotic arm ride. The videos are not online yet, but definitely check them out when they arrive!