I loved the first day of PDC, felt a little antsy by the second, and by the time my flight climbed into the early-morning smog of LA yesterday, I was positively muddled. Speaking in a darkened room to a crowd of strangers is the most inefficient means of communication imaginable, but it used to be that conferences were the only place to learn topics that were insufficient in and of themselves to justify a book and too complex or too esoteric to earn a spot in one of the handful of trade magazines. Now, though, blogging and screencasts have thoroughly risen to the challenge of delivering introductory discussions as well as “tips and tricks.” By the third day of the PDC I was attending 300-level classes and furiously thinking “Go on! Go on! Get to the hard stuff!”

In particular, I couldn’t find sessions that gave me insight into LINQ or Workflow which, along with Atlas, were the major technologies introduced at the conference. Did I see LINQ and Workflow? Yes. Did I see more in the sessions than I saw in the keynotes? Barely. I saw the equivalent of “Hello, World” over and over and in almost every case, I noted sleight-of-hand – a declaration of great capacity bolstered by a demo that, in fact, was without the slightest complexity. I come away from PDC05 feeling that I’m ready to download and install these technologies, but I don’t feel that I have a competitive advantage over developers who chose not to attend the PDC05. I don’t feel that I can go to customers and advise them on these technologies in a way that justifies charging them for that advice. Do the technologies look cool? Sure. Do I have a personal feeling on their worth? Sure. Do I come away from PDC05 knowing where are the corners and sweetspots of the technologies? Absolutely not, despite that type of knowledge being one of the few things that justify the time and expense of traveling to a conference.

These issues and this criticism of the conference structure is not peculiar to the PDC. “Conference sessions” are to the Internet Age what buggy-whips were to the Automotive Age. I just wished that I realized that prior to fastening my seatbelt for the flight home.