[In case you aren't up on the MS lingo -- the Professional Developers Conference is the once in a while conference that Microsoft holds where they talk about all things Microsoft. It is more forward looking than a lot of the other MS conferences.]
I'm going to the PDC to keep up with what is going on with Windows. Drop me a line if you'd like to chat about Google Talk or anything else.
I'm not sure which sessions I'm going to attend yet, but I can tell you that my interests have shifted somewhat since I've shipped software on the outside. I'm much more interested in stuff that can help make Google Talk better now than more forward looking stuff that may not ship for another year yet. I'm also a lot less interested in huge frameworks that tie my product to Windows. While Google Talk is right now just a Windows only application, we've worked hard to keep the Win32 only stuff isolated so that it will be easier for us to port/write on other platforms.
That being said, is anyone working on an Avalon/.Net Jabber/XMPP client? I've been looking at the SSL/TLS support in the WinFX SDK and it might be possible to do it without any reliance on external libraries.