I watched quite a lot of PDC 2008 Talks this week and I really like
that they put all that stuff online for everyone to watch. To learn more about the PDC, check out event photos or see all the sessions, directly go to http://www.microsoftpdc.com/. Another good list of all sessions can be found here: http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/10/pdc2008-quick-video-link-list.html
Here are my
personal favorite session recordings (from what I have seen, I have not seen all talks):
The Future of C# (by Anders Hejlsberg)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL16/
As always Anders is fun to watch and you learn a lot about C#, the new dynamic keywords and whats to come. Not really stuff you will probably use right now, but good to know what we can do and probably will do in a few years. In case you want to watch IronPython or IronRuby, this session is a good prerequisite too.
Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL10/
Jim Hugunin (the creator of IronPython and DLR) talks about IronPython and the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) in general. Fun to watch, interesting insights and generally always interesting to anyone interesting in dynamic languages.
Panel: The Future of Programming Languages
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
I like Panels like this and they had really great guests: Gilad Bracha, Douglas Crockford, Anders Hejlsberg, Erik Meijer, Wolfram Schulte, Jeremy Siek. They get a little bit off-topic at the end, but overall an interesting and very fun to watch discussion with a lot of interesting arguments on all sides (lot of different languages are discussed).
IronRuby: The Right Language for the Right Job
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL44/
I have learned Ruby few months ago and used it for a few days, but I never really liked it and continued to use Python instead, but John Lam (the IronRuby inventor) is a cool dude and give a lot of tips and shows off a lot of cool demos, which are equally interesting even if you would use some other dynamic language than Ruby.
Microsoft Visual C# IDE: Tips and Tricks
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL46/
Interesting and useful Tricks, Dustin shows off a lot of shortcuts
and the whole presentation is in Visual Studio, which is cool.
Visual Studio Debugger Tips & Tricks
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL59/
I like Tips & Tricks talks and this one is good too. Informative and fun to watch as well. I will probably watch it again some time soon, like I will with some of the other talks too (because I usually code or do something else while the videos are running on a secondary monitor ^^).
Mono and .NET (by Miguel de Icaza)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC54/
One of the last talks I discovered after watching many other talks. At first I thought this might be not really interesting for me, since this will probably focus only on Linux and Mono development, but I could not be more wrong. This was a really great talk, Miguel is such a great presenter, even when things go wrong, he makes fun remarks and is always on the topic. He gives great insight of game programming on Mono for Linux, the Mac and even the iPhone, which sounded really cool to me. Other topics were also interesting and fascinating.
Managed Extensibility Framework: Overview
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL33/
If you were every interesting in extending Visual Studio or want to hear about good ideas on how to extend frameworks or applications, this talk is helpful and insightful.
Visual C++: 10 is the New 6
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL13/
I'm not doing much C++ coding anymore, but many years ago this was my main programming language and it is still the most used language for games. This talk is highly informative and Boris Jabes talks in detail about new C++ Features in VS2010 and what is possible, what will get better and what even features will come in the future after VS2010. Also a lot of interesting questions and answers at the end.
The two talks Parallel Programming for C++ and Parallel Programming for Managed Developers were also highly informative and gave us programmers some good ideas on how to make better use of Multi-core systems. I especially like the Talk Parallel Library (TPL), which is insanely easy to use:
Parallel.For(0, 100, i => a[i] = a[i] * a[i]);
Microsoft XNA Game Studio: An Overview
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL43/
Frank Savage from the XNA Team talks about XNA Game Studio 3.0, which is highly informative if you don't know much about XNA yet. For me there was not much new to learn in this talk, but Frank is such a cool guy and it is fun to watch how he presents his stuff, which is one more reason to watch this talk. He also shows off some XNA games and the recently XNA Dream Build Play contest winner games.
The keynotes from Day 1 (Azure, Infos) and Day 2 (Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4) were also interesting to watch. Other sessions sounded also interested and from what I have seen Oslo, Azure, Silverlight, Unit Testing in VS2010 and other new stuff is cool too, but I have no plans to use that stuff anytime soon (maybe Oslo for parsing text, which is easy and cool).
I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I do, definitely a great idea to put them all online :)