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PDC2008: Can you afford not to be there?

Wed, September 24, 2008, 03:05 PM under Events
When I previously blogged about PDC, I hinted that in addition to the pre-conference and the 4 breakout sessions, there would be "even more on the final day of PDC" from the Parallel Computing Platform. The details are now public: make sure you attend the 3 additional sessions of the Parallel Computing symposium on
"A Detailed Look at How Multi-Core Architectures will Unleash Computing Power and Enable Innovation"

Beyond parallelism, we also published additional Windows 7 sessions (inc. a keynote), 2 of which you can see on a screenshot of my partial agenda:

(note to self: next time I submit a session, make sure it starts with quotes so it appears first on the alphabetical list of sessions ;))

Finally, for the swag-oriented amongst you, the motivation comes in the form of a 160GB USB 2 hard drive (which include pre-Beta bits of Windows 7 plus more)! I asked, and presenters won't receive the drive apparently... oh well...

Register now and see you in the city of angels.
Comments [4] |#Permalink
Thursday, 25 September 2008 01:49:00 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Daniel, when it comes to developing for multi-threaded app, could MSFT also talk about immutability/side-effects free ideas and not only talk of the 'next groundbreaking parralel framework and tool' (that will certainly help).

Hopefully Eric Lippert does mention this sometimes and also F# will make all these more popular.
psmacchia
Saturday, 27 September 2008 15:30:16 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
psmacchia: I certainly can't and won't speak on behalf of all of Microsoft, but I can give you my opinion since you posted on my personal blog and your concern is one that I had many years ago.

The community needs both someone that can explain the new enhancements to the various *new* tools/APIs etc and also people that can explain best practises, design principles etc. Nobody has infinite time, so we all prioritise what we can focus on. So, when I personally, write a new blog post or create a new 60-75 minute session, I have to leave some stuff out and leave some stuff in. I choose to leave in the API/tools bits and leave out the rest. Why? Given my day job, I am best suited to explain the new products better than people that don't have my day job; explaining product-free ideas is something that a much larger number of people can do. So hopefully, we all complement each other.

Having written that, you will have noticed that the last 3 years of my career have all been on the bleeding edge. So it is natural for me to describe the new products and let others in following months/years deliver on best practises. The older the technology, the easier it is to explain ancillary ideas and not just the product. On that point, if you are at PDC, you'll be pleasantly surprised with the PRE-conference we have on Parallel Computing as indeed that is going to be more about ideas and thread-based parallelism rather than new product (which is left for me to cover in the main conference breakout).

Let me know if that doesn't make sense and thanks for giving me the opportunity to explain this.
Daniel Moth
Sunday, 28 September 2008 03:00:00 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Daniel, I completely understand your MSFT concern to spread the word about the MS tool/API and the need for prioritizing.

The problem is that you and your MSFT mates have a big visibility, especially amongst beginners that wish to learn how to do concurrent programming. My guess is that they also prioritize the blog/article they read and if you don't speak methodology at the same time that you talk about tool/API, some readers will certainly end up never hear about methodology.

For example I was asking to review recently a book on parralel programming without any mention of side-effect/immutability! (real story)

I wrote a blog post on my stance on the subject and on how developer are (badly) educated on this IMHO:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/05/05/manage-states-in-a-multi-threaded-environment-without-the-synchronization-pain.aspx

Saying that, I still think that what MS is doing for future tool/API sounds promising. Btw here is a parralel pattern that was fairly hard to implement and that could fit nicely into MS future API:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/patricksmacchia/archive/2008/06/10/backgroundworker-closure-and-overridable-task.aspx

PS: good news for the PDC pre-sessions :o)
psmacchia
Monday, 03 November 2008 20:51:22 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)
psmacchia: Hopefully the session met your standards ;-)
Daniel Moth
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