Maybe a Different Kind of Professional Developers' Conference?

The developers didn't want to go, anyway.

So says developer and former Professional Developer's Conference speaker Billy Hollis in a spinny piece on Redmondmag.com on Microsoft's cancellation of the PDC that had been scheduled for next October.

Why? There are plenty of reasons.

Perhaps most important in those developers' eyes is the thought that the efficiency of the .NET platform has paid off in the flood of software that has come out of Microsoft in the last couple of years, and developers need time to catch up. Another developer, Andrew Brust, sees it the same way. How much better, he says, to delay the conference until the next big batch of new technologies is well under way; plus, other dev conferences scheduled for 2007 can stand in just as well.

Skeptics say it sure looks like Microsoft scheduled and then cancelled PDC because it wanted to make a big announcement and then realized it wouldn't be ready. Or maybe it wanted to squeeze all it could out of the first year of the Vista rollout before distracting valuable .NET developers with non-flagship products.

And some, like blogger Larry O'Brien, think it would be quite nice to have a PDC that wasn't scheduled to happen during the ramp-up to new and wonderful Microsoft platforms and technologies. A Microsoft-specific conference where attendees could drill down into mature dev work would be valuable -- to the developers, not just to Microsoft.