PDC Day 3 Sessions

I just completed day three at PDC05 and another evening draws to a close (the picture is outside of my hotel room with a 5 second shutter). I had a little change of pace today: while I attended a few sessions on Atlas and the new XML/XSLT editor in VS 2005, I decided to focus more time in the labs. Sessions overall have been great, but nothing beats hands on learning.

The session DVDs will be available after the show, so I decided to not fret over missing a session here and there. I'm glad I did this: I went though a number of labs, including Expression, SQL Server 2005, and VS 2005. Some of the new SQL Server stuff is really great: the enhanced T-SQL error handling with TRY/CATCH blocks is very cool. Also the native web services support is relatively easy to implement -- I haven't thought of _how_ I'd use this in a real world application, but it's fun to play with. Tomorrow I'll pick the top 2 or 3 sessions, at most, and spend the rest of the time in the lab.

I think Microsoft should integrate more lab or classroom situations in future conferences. Sitting in sessions all day can be a bit of a challenge, so mixing it up with more labs and hands on work would be great.