A preliminary list of technical sessions has been announced and the registration has been opened for PDC 2008. Some of the interesting sessions:

Architecting Services for the Cloud
From design to implementation, building a scalable, available web service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session will discuss the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how Microsoft's cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service

Logical Queuing: Developing Occasionally Connected Clients
With Sync Services for ADO.NET, Sync Framework, etc., what technology should you use to develop applications that enable end-user productivity regardless of network connectivity? The reality is no one technology solves the problem. We will demonstrate how you can build offline-capable rich client applications by combining technologies like ADO.NET and SQL Server Compact Edition with the Microsoft Sync Framework. Next we take an architectural approach for "using the right tool for the right job" and show how many of these technologies actually work best when brought together in a cohesive solution that highlights the values each technology has to offer.

Under the Hood: Architecture of Storage in the Cloud
Get a deeper understanding of the storage architecture and understand how the storage platform can be used to the best of its capabilities. From low-level streams all the way to partitioned tables, cloud storage must be designed and optimized for the scaling demands of the cloud. This session will examine the underlying architecture of each layer of the storage service as well as the data modeling and programming interfaces exposed.

Under the Hood: Building SQL Server Data Services
Learn how we built SQL Server Data Services to address hard distributed systems and operations challenges. We will describe how we solved problems like failure detection, leader election, and automatic failover using a new innovation called Distributed Data Fabric. We will go deep and elaborate on the changes we made to the core SQL Server RDBMS to ship this massively scalable data service. We will also describe the operational systems we use to provision, monitor, and manage SSDS without interrupting the service. Finally, you will learn how we manage and run this service in our datacenters.

The rest of the sessions can be found on the Microsoft PDC 2008 site.