PDC’08 is officially _on _for October 27-30th this year: http://microsoftpdc.com/.
My team will certainly have some really fun stuff to show off, and just glancing at the preliminary list of teaser sessions, it’s going to be a blast.
A few of us have teamed up to give a PreCon. That’s code-word for a full day of neverending concurrency goodness. From http://microsoftpdc.com/agenda/Preconference.aspx:
Concurrent, Multi-core Programming on Windows and .NET resenter(s): David Callahan, Joe Duffy, Stephen Toub The leap from single-core to multi-core technology is altering computing as we know it, enabling increased productivity, powerful energy-efficient performance, and leading-edge advanced computing experiences. The good news is that Windows and .NET offer rich support for threading and synchronization to take advantage of these new platforms. This session, presented by David Callahan, Microsoft distinguished engineer, Joe Duffy, author of “Concurrent Programming on Windows” (Addison-Wesley), and Stephen Toub, program manager lead for the Concurrency Development Platform team at Microsoft, will cover a broad range of topics, including mechanisms to create, coordinate, and synchronize among threads; best practices for concurrent libraries and apps; and techniques for improving scalability, including lock-free algorithms. Focus will be on .NET programming, including the next generation of parallel programming support within the Framework, but Windows internals and C++ nuggets will be discussed too.
About the presenter(s): David Callahan joined Microsoft in 2005. He is a Distinguished Engineer leading the Parallel Computing Platform Team within Visual Studio® focused on incubating technology for the coming manycore processors. This team is producing exciting new technologies as part of Visual Studio and also driving the Parallel Computing Initiative, a company wide effort to deliver customer value from the power of future high-performance processors. David’s background is in programming languages, parallel programming techniques, and compilation techniques focused on expressing and exploiting concurrency.
Stephen Toub is a Senior Program Manager Lead on the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft, where he spends his days focusing on the next generation of programming models for concurrency. Stephen is also a Contributing Editor for MSDN® Magazine, for which he writes the .NET Matters column, and he’s an avid speaker at conferences like TechEd and DevConnections. Prior to working on the Parallel Computing Platform, Stephen designed and built enterprise applications for companies such as GE, McGraw-Hill, BankOne, and JetBlue. He was a developer for Microsoft Outlook as well as for the Microsoft Office Solution Accelerators. In his spare time, Stephen loves to sing, and he spends as much time as possible with his beautiful wife Tamara.
Joe Duffy leads development for Microsoft’s Parallel Extensions to .NET technology, a set of library and runtime technologies for concurrent and parallel computing. He founded the project in 2006 with Parallel Language Integrated Query (aka PLINQ), an innovative declarative parallel query analysis and execution engine. Prior to Parallel Extensions, Joe worked on transactional memory, library and VM support for concurrency in the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team, and has written 3 functional language compilers (Scheme, Common LISP, and Haskell). He has written two books, including Concurrent Programming on Windows (Addison-Wesley, 2008), and in his spare time reads and writes (code and text), plays guitar, and studies music theory.
Be there, or be square. The slides aren’t even finalized yet, so let me know if you have particular topics you’d like to learn more about.