I keep getting asked this question, so I bet others are asking as well.

Yes, the dates for PDC08 have been announced: 27 – 30 October 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Save the date, and clear the time with your boss, spouse, entourage coordinator, indoor Ultimate Frisbee league, and anyone else who normally has a lock on your coordinates.

No, no other details have been announced yet. I think that Microsoft focused on  TechEd 2008 at the moment.

But you can subscribe to the PDC event RSS feed so that updates are delivered straight to you.

The talks from the 2008 Lang.NET Symposium (28 – 30 January 2008) have been published for your viewing pleasure. The Talks page lets you choose between viewing in the browser using Silverlight, or a viewing .wmv file. If you choose the Silverlight option, hover your mouse near the bottom of the video for playback controls.

I sing the praises of Jimmy Schementi who put them up earlier without realizing the demand for them, and incurred the wrath of his ISP for bogarting the bandwidth. Now the talks are back, and some initial link boo-boos appear to be all better now.

Ted Neward already posted his copious highlights of the symposium (day one, day two, and day three), as well as list of his favorite videos. Ted spoke at Lang.NET on Scala.

My next whirlwind C# tour screencast is up. Whirlwind 2: What's new in C# 2 - Iterators is now on Channel 9 for your viewing pleasure. In just nine minutes you can learn what iterators are and what problem they address. Get down. Get funky.

Resources

Iterators, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library

yield, C# Reference, MSDN Library

Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour issue, 2006 (Vol. 21, No. 3)

Fun with Iterators and state machines, Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek (blog). Focus on the cool compiler and runtime magic that makes iterators possible. Based on prereleased Whidbey bits, but you get the idea.

Iterators with C#2, Patrick Smacchia, TheServerSide.net.

Using C# 2.0 iterators to simplify writing asynchronous code part 1 and part 2, Michael Entin's notebook (blog). Stretch your mind: using iterators to implement the .NET asynch pattern.

Previous episodes

Whirlwind 1: What's new in C# 2 - Generics (notes)

Erik and Monica Mork are rocking and rolling on their new Silverlight podcast, SparklingClient.com. The challenge, of course, is to relate a rich graphical user experience (UX), and developer and design experiences, in an audio podcast. Erik and Monica are Portland area developers, and enthusiastic about their topic.

Erik went to MIX08 for the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 release. Download the bits, and the tool, and get started. Then let Sparkling Client be your guide.

Get your hands on slides, code samples, and whatnots from the Boise Code Camp 2008 sessions. My session just points back to posts on this blog: no surprises there. That is all.

The Portland Adobe Developer User Group is hosting Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, on Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 6:00 PM, speaking on "What's Possible in a Post-Web 2.0 World?" at PCC Sylvania, Library Room 112. Networking begins at 5:30 PM.

Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new ideas built on Web Services. You will also learn how others, empowered by technology advances—known as “Web Scale Computing”—created businesses that weren’t practical until recently... (More...)

Amazon has done phenomenal things with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so this ought to be great.

See the Upcoming Meetings for the Portland Adobe Developer User Group for additional details.

My whirlwind screencast series about C# 2.0 and 3.0 language features premiers today on Microsoft's Channel 9. Wahoo!

This is a whirlwind tour of the major language features that have been introduced in C# since the language was first released. The idea is to cover a lot of ground quickly, so that you can get the broad perspective and know what features you want to spend more time learning about. The objective is to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

In this first episode I look at a major feature introduced in C# 2.0: Generics. Watch it on Channel 9:

Whirlwind 1: What's new in C# 2 - Generics

Thanks to my gracious host and producer, Bruce Kyle, Microsoft ISV Advisor. Catch Bruce and his team on the US ISV Developer Evangelism blog.

Resources

Here are a couple of resources for digging deeper into C# generics.

Generics, C# Programming Guide, MSDN Library.

An Introduction to C# Generics, Juval Löwy, Visual Studio 2005 Technical Articles, MSDN Library.

Anders Hejlsberg - What's so great about generics? Channel 9 video. An elevator speech by the fellow who's described himself as chief randomizer on the C# team.

DotNetRock Show #34: Juval Löwy (Again). "Carl and Mark talk to Juval about, among other things, the new version of C# (2.0). Of the new features, Juval's favorite is generics."

Generic Programming Under .NET, and CLR Generics Versus C++ Templates, Stanley B. Lippman, MSDN Magazine, April and June 2005. Pair of articles compare and contrast generics and C++ templates, respectively, by a noted C++ authority.

The Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime, Andrew Kennedy and Don Syme, Microsoft Research, 2001. If you like digging really deep, this is the original research paper on how to introduce generics into the CLR.

If you have a great C# generics resource that I didn't mention, leave a comment about it.

Last month Mary Jo Foley wrote that Microsoft is working on a new language named D as part of Oslo. Before we leap to conclusions about what D might stand for, let us recall that the C language was so named because it was derived from B which was a stripped down version of BCPL. Such is the stuff of software engineers' so-called humor. So much for musing.

Indeed, D is a declarative modeling language. According to Mary Jo, Microsoft's Chief Modeling Officer (nice title) Don Box spoke about D at the 2008 Lang.Net Symposium at the end of January. D, says Don, is about "putting more and more of your application into data and putting less in code." That is central to Oslo, the next technology wave from Microsoft, which has as its goal "making a new class of model-driven and service-enabled applications mainstream."

A few days after Mary Jo's article, InfoWorld ran an article covering Bill Gates speaking at the 2008 Office System Developers Conference on Microsoft's declarative modeling language effort, but Bill didn't mention D by name. Okay, D may very well be a project codename, so let's not get too invested in the name. And even if it is the current name of the language, what are the chances that marketing will be able let an opportunity like that go by unspoiled?

Between these two articles, Don and Bill have some pithy, interesting things to say about declarative languages and their importance in modeling complex systems.

Slides are now available from the talk I gave with Jason Mauer, The (Re-)emergence of Declarative Programming, at Software Association of Oregon Development SIG on February 21, 2008.

The session explored declarative programming and its history, then examined recent interest in declarative styles of programming, particularly on Microsoft platforms, and what forces are driving the resurgence of declarative programming.

Join the SAO Social Network site (if you're not already a member), and go to the DevSIG group to access the slides.

Proposals have been coming in for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at TechEd Developer 2008. Take a look at the ones we've received so far, and vote for your favorites.

And now is the time to submit a BOF proposal of your own. As I've said, this is a great way to get involved in the professional development community and connect with people who share your passion about some aspect of technology, community, or careers. I hear that moderating a BOF session also looks good on resumes.

Do it today so other people can vote for your session!

In order to claim my blog on Technorati, I need to post an obligatory link to Technorati Profile.

Okay, okay, now everybody move along. There's nothing else to see here.

Well it's eight o'clock in Boise, Idaho.
I'll find my limo driver. Mister, take us to the show.
— What's Your Name, Lynyrd Skynyrd

Flying in to Boise means getting to see the beautiful surrounding mountains from the air. Boise is situated in a valley basin with mountains all around it. With the winter snow on them they are simply stunning. And the view from the ground isn't bad either.

I got in Friday in time for the presenter party with food, drink, familiar faces, and an agile exercise of replacing the schedule in the attendee packs. Scott Hanselman was in the house, fresh in from MIX08, with his laptop out on the bar evangelizing to the bartender. It was a nice, warm welcome to town.

Boise Code Camp had all appearances of a great success. Scuttlebutt has it that the final attendance at the door was around 375. Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! Boise has just raised the bar for code camps in the northwest. You guys rock.

My talk, The New Programming Model — C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5, was well received. I had 300 slides and a ten minute demo in 60 minutes, and not a single bullet point anywhere. Okay, some slides only had one or three words on them. I got some great feedback on the talk, thanks campers!

I am not going to post my slides since the format leans so heavily on the delivery. And even compressed that is a pretty hefty download. Instead, I am announcing here that I'll be working with a friend at Microsoft to record the session as a series of short videos for your nerd viewing pleasure. We plan to get the first ones in the can this week, and we may need another week or two on production and working out hosting. Watch the blog for details.

In the meantime, here are some great starting points for digging deeper into C# 2.0 and 3.0 features.

• What’s New in the C# 2.0 Language and Compiler, MSDN Library
• Overview of C# 3.0, MSDN Library
• Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 3

Inspiration for the presentation format came from Dick Hardt's keynote address at OSCON 2005 on Identity 2.0; and he, in turn, was inspired by the lectures of law prof  Lawrence Lessig.

I enjoyed the other sessions that I went to at camp. I am only disappointed that the laws of physics prevented me from being in two sessions at the same time. Mark Miller of Devexpress got crazy passionate about creating great UX for two solid hours, but I had to duck out after the first one to go give my talk.

The afters party was a nice affair, and we toured the fabled and swank Code Trip bus. So that's how rock stars tour! I'll be meeting up with the Code Trip crew again when they hit Portland on April 10 for the PADNUG MIX-A-LOT, and then as they make wind up their tour in Seattle for the Microsoft MVP Summit.

A great big note of appreciation goes to this year's camp director, David Starr, and to his personal support team and lovely wife, Eleanor Starr. Thanks also to Chris Brandsma, chief session wrangler, and Richard Hundhausen for fine hospitality. Congratulations to everyone on a superlative code camp!