PDC09 | Craig's Musings

First of all, I want to thank Mike Swanson (@anyware) for his original work (e.g. for MIX09 and also for PDC09). Good stuff.

That being said, I noticed that there were posted sessions missing–six altogether–from the 11/19/2009-dated batch files here; so, I thought I’d post my “fix”:

It may be worth noting that my rename “style” includes session codes (e.g. SVC29), making it easier (for me anyway) to distinguish one overall theme from another.

For your convenience, here are copy of the original instructions for PDC09 use:

If you’d like to download all of the keynote and session content, download a recent build of cURL (~250K), and extract it to your folder-of-choice. Then, download PDC09Downloader.zip (1.49KB) and extract the PDC09Downloader.bat file to the same folder. From a command prompt, start PDC09Downloader by passing it one of the following parameters: WMVHIGH, WMV, MP4, PPTX. Then wait. For files that aren’t available, cURL will download a file that is around 221 bytes in size (if you change the extension to .htm and open it, you’ll see that the file is simply an HTML “not found” error page).

To rename the files, first, download the PDC09 Renamer batch file (4.52KB). Then, extract the PDC09Renamer.bat file to the folder that contains your downloaded files, and from a command prompt, type PDC09Renamer WMV to rename all of the .WMV files to the full session title. By changing the parameter, you can also rename your PPTX and MP4 files.

Update at 6pm Pacific: It looks like both of my scripts, above, are live on http://microsoftpdc.com/Videos, too.

So, I finally was able to complete my PDC sessions scheduling. It was a bit more “involved” then I expected, and I have a few suggestions for, in this case, Microsoft as they prepare for future conferences:

Enable Outlook (ICS-based) scheduling sooner
Include the online session home page as a link in the ICS file
Default to “no alert” in ICS files (e.g. avoid creating noise from multiple sessions of interest all vying for my attention on my smart phone)
Add a map link to help guide attendees to where sessions are being held (i.e. nowadays location-aware service is expected, IMHO; so, allow users to opt-in where correlating to present location (device GPS coordinates) is concerned)
Promote session hashtags (e.g. help guide the use of Twitter et al by going beyond just #PDC09)
When you post a location and date/time, and you change it, indicate the change more prominently (e.g. maintain version history)

Next year, I’d love to say something like, “I’m a PC. PDC10 scheduling…was my idea.”