One thing I love to do at conferences is the Hands on Labs. There is no email or i.m. or phone to interrupt you while you are working. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to do them this time around while at PDC, but I did do some of them when I got home, in preparation for a talk titled “What I saw at PDC” that I gave at my user group (Vermont.NET) on Monday night. The two sets of labs that I did were for LINQ and for Atlas - two technologies that I am *really* excited about.
Currently, both HOLs require the Beta2 release of Visual Studio 2005. This does not mean Beta2 and beyond, but the actual Beta2 bits that were widely distributed over the summer. The Atlas labs are available online. You will notice a message in red indicating the Beta2 requirement, but expect a version soon that will work with the RC bits that were distributed at PDC.
The LINQ labs are also available online. Check the lower part of the page. Since LINQ is not really for VS2005, pay attention to the caveats and warnings about intellisense etc. I had no problems compiling and running the samples. Although I found that as I built the sample up and then commented out later functions so that I could run the first part at my meeting, it would no longer compile and though I could show and explain the code (explain thanks to the great explanations in the HOL), it would only run the last good build which was the very last of the demos that I created.
I think that both of these sets of HOLs were written extremely clearly. Not only do they walk you through the code bit by bit with great explanations of what the code is doing, but for each example, they give you a full listing of the code at the end which is helpful in case you have placed code in the wrong spot or just can't get something to run.
If an event like PDC were a month long, with time to go to every session of interest, try out every hands on lab, and somehow magically having all of your work put on hold so that you aren't a year behind when you return and also magically getting paid while you do all of this - it would be heaven.