Kent

I took off Friday morning. It's not like I saw any talks at PDC -- I spent most of my waking, non-drinking hours at the Coding4Fun booth. It was cool -- having the Phidgets guys there was great, I kept watching people look at their displays and the gears started going. They are great little knicknacks for geeky projects. Even one of the guys from Kuka kept coming over, asking more and more technical questions. Perhaps we'll see some Phidgets in an upcoming version of their robots? Ed & Richard from SharpLogic were also there, showing off a few things that will be appearing on C4F sometime in the near future (I hope).

Of course, both LINQ and Atlas were items I was most interested in, as I spent a fair bit of time leading up to PDC preparing for the release. How successful were the two "launches"? I decided to do a little comparison using Technorati, Feedster and the new Google BlogSearch to see. I had to add "ASP.NET" to the Atlas queries, to avoid any links to Ayn Rand's ... book.

BlogSearch
    LINQ: 874
    Atlas: 443

Technorati
    LINQ: 695
    Atlas: 339

Feedster
    LINQ: 2190
    Atlas: 1022

IceRocket
    LINQ: 761
    Atlas: 390

So, it seems LINQ is ahead for now, by almost a 2:1 margin. Still, both seemed to kick up a fair bit of interest, and I spoke with quite a few people who were excited about it, trying the Hands-on-Labs (that you can also see here and here)

What else were people talking about?

• Food was good -- no "cold breakfasts" to deal with this time
• Expression! At last, we might have a great set of graphical design tools. Many people mentioned to me that they liked what they saw (of course, that could be because of Brian's demo -- yes, I'm a suck up)
• The new Office look & feel worried at least one guy I spoke with, "Yes, it's simpler. Yes, I like it, but I still think this will mean we'll ahve to send every admin through two weeks of training to get them working with it."
• To me, the track lounges were seas of blue shirts, with hardly any customers in there. I know if I weren't also a blue shirt, I would have been a little intimidated to enter those spaces to ask questions. They need to be made less intimidating somehow.
• Far be it from me to say, especially when speaking of the Group VP that I have the most respect for, but Jim Allchin telling people, "If you go to the store right now, you can get one of a limited number of the HTC Universals (list price $1000) for $149" in the middle of his keynote was a stupid thing to do. About half the people left at that point, rushing to get one. They then missed the demos of LINQ and Atlas. Not to mention that the price differential will probably mean more than a few end up here in the next day or two. Of course, I'm just bitter because I couldn't buy one.
• I heard a few complaints that scheduling had "too many interesting topics at the same time" or that were in "too small of a room". In particular, talks around Sharepoint and/or Web Parts (in that order)

UPDATED: Added IceRocket stats