Last week, I attended MDC 2009 in Chicago with the Wife, and we both had a really good time. We drove down the night before and stayed at the Hyatt, where the conference was being held in order to avoid the 3-4am wake up call we would have had to endure to get to the conference on time.
We got a surprisingly (I thought) good rate on a room at only $145/night, and while the room was nothing special, the hotel overall was very impressive (guess I don't travel much). The Hyatt has two towers and a sprawling under ground maze of shops and conference rooms (and hidden parking areas). The fitness center was top notch, complete with a full line of life fitness weight equipment, free weights and numerous treadmills and ellipticals. The treadmills and ellipticals each had their own 8" touch LCD screen which controlled the machine and let you watch whatever TV show you wanted. The only thing missing was video inputs so you could hook up portable dvd player. Although if you had an RF convertor you could probably manage something.
Registration Tuesday morning was from 7:00 to 8:30, and we made it down stairs by 8. The woman checking us in had never seen a husband and wife at the same conference before. Breakfast was good, and there was plenty of good seating (round tables) for eating, although you had to turn your chair to watch the keynote.
The keynote started about 8:35 with the same video that was shown at PDC during one of the WPF sessions I believe. I did not attend PDC, but have watched quite a few of the videos. There were some interesting demos showing off what you can do in WPF, and that it is in fact suitable for line of business applications (and not just pretty rotating cubes). There was also some Windows 7 goodness shown, including the ability to mount and boot from VHDs. We were supposed to get Win7 on DVD, but it wasn't ready yet, so we’ll be getting it in the mail. I already have it downloaded from MSDN, but I’ll probably save the blank DVD and just install off USB.
I really wasn't sure what tracks I wanted to attend, although there were a few I knew I could probably pass on. Reading thru other peoples write-ups and such, I wish I could have attended a few more sessions, but I’m now refocused on watching as many of the PDC videos as possible.
This was originally going to be one long blog post, but in the end it was too long, so I’ve broken it up.