With PDC 2008 around the corner, I'm all kinds of geeked up! You see, I'm a PDC virgin. I never could get approval to go to PDC at former jobs... frankly it was hard to justify it. When I went out on my own almost 2 years ago, one thing I said to myself was "I'm going to PDC no matter what" as I had no boss to check with (well, except the one at home). Unfortunately that year they canceled PDC, and I went crying all the way home (not that long of a commute considering I work from home).

This time around, when I saw the dates were posted and registration opened up, I registered immediately. I even elected to treat myself to a precon session!

If you've taken a look at the session list, you may ask yourself "why is a SharePoint guy going to PDC when there are only a few SharePoint sessions?" Wow... there are just so many reasons. Honestly, I'm looking forward to going to a show where I can focus on some other stuff. There are four awesome SharePoint sessions I'll certainly be hitting:

• SharePoint 2007: Creating SharePoint Applications with VS 2008 by Chris Johnson (see CJ's post about this session... looks cool!)
• SharePoint Online: Extending your Service by Troy Hopwood
• SharePoint 2007: Advanced Async Workflow Messaging
• FAST: Building Search-Driven Portals with MOSS & Silverlight (oh yeah... maybe the most interesting one!)

Aside from the Office & SharePoint stuff, there are two other topics I'm very interested in absorbing: Silverlight & anything related to the cloud / Live services / Mesh.

I've been remiss the last year or so in truly diving into Silverlight. I saw v1 as a toy and have held out for v2 that, from my POV, really puts the power in my hands. So to get my deep dive, I registered for the full-day precon on Silverlight with Jeff Prosise.

As for the cloud / online services, as a SharePoint person I see this as one of biggest areas for potential growth in SharePoint adoption as well as possibilities for developers.

Of course there is a lot of other stuff that will be there I'm looking forward to (Workflow Foundation futures, Oslo, SQL, Home Server, WCF, Visual Studio, etc)... and I can't wait for the keynote. I'm like a kid in the candy store that week.

Are you a SharePoint guy and at PDC? Don't worry... you won't be alone! I know of a few SharePoint MVP's and folks from the product team who will be around. Oh yeah... have you heard of SharePoint by Day, SharePint by Night? We'll be doing another one of these informal socials to help generate next-morning headaches... don't you fear! Stay tuned... I'll have another post up soon on when/where we'll be doing this.

Only 16 days left... ooo... I'm excited!