Day 1

A keynote by Bill Gates. It is funny... I thought only geeks would really be excited by the fact that Bill Gates appeared in person at the event. But everyone I tell seems equally excited - it just goes to show what an icon Bill Gates has become in all walks of life. The keynote focussed on the future of Windows ( codenamed Longhorn ) and contained a lot of humourous moments ( Microsoft is not afraid to poke fun at itelf when the opportunity presents itself ). The fact that most of the Longhorn features are still years away dampens my excitement somewhat but the concepts are truly revolutionary. Since I am more interested in the short term impacts of the new Microsoft technology I decided to focus my attention on the ASP.NET V2 "Whidbey" sessions.

The first session I attended was on ASP.NET: Security Best Practices to Protect Against Hacker Attacks which contained real world advice on concepts that could be applied in existing ASP.NET applications. I found this session to be very useful in terms of identifying areas where DotNetNuke could be improved from a security perspective.

Following the session I met with Rob Howard to discuss the dotnetnuke.com site migration as well as a number of other items pertaining to the DotNetNuke project. Rob wanted to be sure that Microsoft's sponsorship of the DotNetNuke project would be emphasized in the Birds of Feather session scheduled for the evening.

The Exhibitors area was opened in the late afternoon with various ethnic food and beer available to attendees. I spent a couple of hours discussing open source portals with Cory Isakson from the Rainbow project in preparation for our Birds of Feather session. We are facing many similar challenges on our projects and have many of the same goals. We also discussed ways our communities could collaborate better to achieve these goals.

The Birds of Feather session was attended by around 100 people with various interest levels. There were many excellent questions and suggestions; unfortunately it seemed like the time elapsed too fast to cover all project areas.

Following our BoF session, I attended a session on Blogging. If there was one underlying theme of this PDC apart from the new Microsoft tehnologies, I would have to say it was blogging - the phenomenon was everywhere - hats, T-shirts, etc.... And wow, what an animated community! The session featured many of the current blogging leaders going head to head on the future of this immature technology