(October 27, 2003) - Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2003 started off with six preconference educational sessions. Most notable among these were Jeff Richter's (of Wintellect fame) session on CLR internals, Chris Sells and Rocky Lhotka's session on smart clients, and Tim Ewald and Don Box's session on .NET Web services.

For much of the Web services session, Don Box sat at the keyboard and wrote code while Tim Ewald spoke. The topics they covered together were everything that an ardent .NET Web service coder could ask for - and then some! Starting with first principles, the conversation soon progressed into the intricacies of tweaking SOAP content to produce more customized behavior than is typically available from out-of-the-box .NET. After the daylong introductory sessions ended, there was a brief pause before the start of the nightly Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions. During this pause, Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn hosted a great live game show called ".NET Rocks!" Following the "Hollywood Squares" formula, contestants chosen from the audience were invited to say whether they agreed or disagreed with the answers to .NET trivia questions posed by the show's hosts.

The answers were given by a panel of MSDN Regional Directors hand-picked by the hosts – including NETDJ's own Tim Huckaby, Patrick Hynds, and Scott Hanselman. NETDJ's Mobility Editor, Jon Box, was also supposed to be on the panel but unfortunately was delayed by the enormous wildfires burning in Southern California which, for a short time, held up all flights into LAX. This interruption of flights has had a noticeable effect on many aspects of the PDC thus far, as many exhibitors, speakers, and attendees were delayed.

True to its "Hollywood Squares" inspiration, the panelists for ".NET Rocks" mixed a liberal dose of humor into the answers they gave. This, along with the many great giveaways (including an Xbox) for the audience, contributed to a truly festive atmosphere. As Carl Franklin himself shouted at the end, ".NET ROCKS!!!"

The day ended with a series of three BOF sessions, in which like-minded developers were encouraged to congregate in specific rooms to discuss a given topic. For example, one hosted by Patrick Hynds and Michele Leroux-Bustamente covered the topic of hosting high-availability Web sites on ASP.NET and IIS. The topic may not sound as exciting as something like the Compact Framework or Yukon, but you simply cannot deny the importance of things like redundancy, load-balancing, and service-level agreements – at least not if you want to keep your job!

A hot topic of conversation at the conference Sunday was speculation about the contents of Bill Gates' Monday keynote - as well as that of the CDs containing Yukon and Whidbey that will be available thereafter. Tantalizing references have been dropped into almost all of the sessions, but those wanting more information will just have to wait until Monday!