As with previous TechWaves, there are once again a number of changes. The most obvious one is that this year's event is at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino rather than Caesar's Palace. While not the complete move out of Vegas that I was hoping for, at least it's an improvement.

Another big change is that the entire schedule is shifted back a day. The welcome reception is now on Monday evening. As a result, the general conference doesn't begin until Tuesday and runs until mid-afternoon on Friday. The special event (unannounced as I write this) is on Thursday evening rather than Wednesday evening.

One major improvement is that we'll no longer have the technical keynotes after the general keynotes in an all-day keynote endurance marathon. There are two keynotes on Tuesday morning, followed by a combination of education courses (beginning with EDU), techsummits (beginning with MBL or TEC) and plenary sessions (beginning with PLN) the remainder of Tuesday. Education sessions and techsummits continue throughout the rest of the conference, particularly in the mornings.

Unfortunately, there was one step backwards in functionality for this year's conference. The conference registration site, for the first time, failed to indicate who was doing the presentation of each session. Particularly for technical breakout sessions, that information is one of the crucial data points I consider before signing up for a session. As a result, I haven't bothered to register for any of the sessions in advance this year. Hopefully the presenter information will be available on-site, and I'll be able to make my selections then. One of the problems I had last year is that a lot of the sessions were moved around from the locations shown on the registration site. I had exported the original information to Outlook and then synched that with the mobile device I was using to navigate the conference. Since I hadn't bothered to check for location changes when I arrived on-site, I ended up going to a lot of the wrong locations. This year, besides not showing the presenters, the registration site doesn't show the location of the session either. For that matter, I no longer see an export to Outlook option on the registration site. Make that more than one step backward.

If you'd like to come to the session I'm doing this year (gee, isn't that why most people come to TechWave...<grin>) it's DEV302 - Using PowerBuilder to Develop Applications for Oracle: Special Considerations, an updated and expanded version of one of the sessions I did last year. It's currently scheduled for Wednesday from 2:15 to 3:45 pm. I'll also be in the Tech Support Lab on Thursday and Friday.

The ISUG Enhancement Sessions are just before lunchtime on the last day of the conference. There has to be some better way to handle it, since I haven't been impressed with the turnout. Perhaps have the lunches at the enhancement session. That's what they did for the exhibit hall last year and are planning to again on Wednesday. It worked well last year. I also can't help wonder if the enhancement sessions wouldn't work better if they were earlier in the week, perhaps sometime after the applicable keynote. People always seem a little sluggish the day after the special event. I suppose it's better than last year, when they held the enhancement sessions just before the special event. Last year the ISUG annual meeting was held at lunchtime on the last day. I don't see the ISUG annual meeting listed on the agenda at all; you may have to check your on-site schedule to see if and when it's being held.

Last but not least, if you're a PowerBuilder fan (and I have to assume you are if you're reading this), this year should be our conference. One of the highlights of this year's conference will be the "official unveiling" of PowerBuilder 11 and demonstration of early work on PowerBuilder 12 features. A significant number of the technical breakout sessions, more than I can remember in recent years, are on using the new features in PowerBuilder.