Who/What do you want to see at TechEd? PDC?

This year is a big conference year in the .NET world. This year we have both TechEd and PDC.

Tradiditionally, TechEd is 50/50 between IT professionals (infrastructure folks) and Develoeprs. For developers, why go to TechEd instead of PDC? TechEd is traditionally geared more to current shipping technologies and PDC is more futures.

Last year, TechEd covered probably more futures than current technology in the developer space. I believe primarily this was for a few reasons. One, the current stack was relatively old (not much has changed since VS 2002) and that there was no PDC - so there was a good demand for futures.

It will be curious to see how TechEd evolves this year with that mix of current vs. future technology.

The other thing that differentiates between TechEd and PDC is that TechEd (particularly last year) had a lot of non-MS employees doing the speaking. PDC is almost exclusively MS employees, which makes senses due to the futures slant. In my opinion, I prefer to hear from the non-microsoft types on the current stack of technolgies (teched flavour). The reason is that I find it very interesting to hear how people are using this technology in the field. Sure, there are MS employees who use the current stack everyday, but I really want to hear how the other half lives. I'm hearing rumours that the TechEd speaker roster is being staffed more by MS employees this year than last. Is that because they are covering more futures at TechEd this year? Perhaps. We are expecting this summer a major new release of VS2005/.NET and SQL Server. People are going to want to hear about this stuff for sure. I'm guessing PDC (September) will be focussed more on Futures further out....Longhorn, Indigo, Orcas, etc.

 

I'd be curious which one you plan on going to - and what you expect to see along these lines.