In case you're missing out on the big events at PDC, don't worry!  Most of the presentations can be found here.  Keep an eye out for webcasts and extra things coming over the next couple of weeks.  There's a LOT of stuff coming from Microsoft now regarding our next revision of our developer tools and languages (Whidbey), our next gen database (Yukon), and our next major platform (Longhorn and the supporting API, WinFx).

As a guy who used to do a lot of Ada programming, I've always missed the "generics" that were found in that language.  One really cool thing is that the next version of C# will incorporate a strongly-typed generic mechanism.  While not as complex as Ada generics (thankfully!), it will definitely lead up to some higher-performance applications.  The nice thing about generics in C# is that they provide stronger type binding, eliminating (or reducing) the need for Object casting and boxing/unboxing, which is an expensive operation during execution.

Ironically, this is almost the opposite effect that you will get in Java generics (coming in the 1.5 release), which appears to force boxing in many cases when using generics (in fact, I heard one Sun person at JavaOne mention that boxing was introduced specifically to "make generics work right").  This potentially means the performance gap between Java and C# virtual machines will get wider.  Only time will tell, but I've clearly made my bets.  Of course, the big advantage of Java still remains: You can make an application run slowly and not take advantage of the underlying platform anywhere at anytime 

P.S. -- Peter Drayton is back!  Let's hope it's for good this time!  I always enjoyed reading his blog.  Much easier than walking down two flights of stairs to just talk to him