I am writing this from the Los Angeles Convention Center, in Los Angeles, home of the PDC. I will be here all week, learning about what's coming in the future and also proctoring some Hands On Labs. I am officially proctoring SQL Server 2005 Hands On Labs but my good friend and former VB product team colleague Steve Lasker was on my flight down and he told me that there are VB Labs as well and that I wrote some of them back when I was on the VB team. So I think I can help proctor those as well, yes?

The Technical Tracks at PDC this year are

• Presentation - featuring Avalon (now called the Windows Presentation Foundation), IE7, Atlas
• Data & Systems - featuring SQL 2005, WinFS, ADO.NET
• Communications - featuring Indigo (now called the Windows Communications Foundation)
• Fundamentals - the guts of Windows
• Office & SharePoint - Office 12 and some VSTO
• Tools & Languages - VS Orcas, Avalon for VS developers, VSTS, the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework, and next next versions of VB and C#

Lots of stuff to see. There are a handful of Whidbey sessions, a few sessions on mixing Whidbey and Vista, but most of the sessions are on stuff that won't be shipping until next year and beyond.

I'll blog daily on what I saw.