General comments at the end of the PDC

Boy am I tired.

First, coming to these things requires like 14 hours of activity each day.  Add to that the fact that booth duty requires standing like 6 hours each day and I can't wait to get back to my desk!

Second, I can't sleep without my wife.  Tonight I'm going to sleep like a baby.

Tue PM

So I haven't had a chance to blog for a while.  My apologies. 

At the end of the last entry I indicated I was about to attend the Managed/Native Interop Birds of a Feather session 10-11 on Tue.  There was approximately 30-40 of us there and Adam and Sonja hosted, taking suggestions for future features in the interop features of the CLR.  Lots of good suggestions.  One thing that was requested was a tool that would compare an IDL or TypeLib against an Interop Assembly.  Maybe I'll write one.

Wed

I met some VSIP partners whom I'd never had a chance to meet.  LogicLibrary was very prominent at this show and they came by and chatted about Everett Extras.  Turns out it was John from LogicLibrary whom I'd actually helped over the phone to get their package to load.  Much thanks to John since that exercise worked the kinks out of the VSIPDev.com package load key generation process.  The email that you get from VSIPDev.com containing the key string and the instructions are much clearer now.  Our documentation folks are even working on a Walkthrough in this area that will really help VSIP partners to get their package load keys working correctly.

Wed was less booth duty than previous days plus one meeting with Intel.  All the rest of the day was less 'work' and more education/conference attendee stuff.  I had the opportunity to attend Chris Anderson's session on Longhorn Application Fundamentals.  Longhorn apps are very cool and easy to write.  Some day, we'll have to figure out how the next version of Visual Studio should take advantage of the Longhorn features.  Another session I attended was the Peer-To-Peer Networking offerings being created for Longhorn (and some of this is available in XP service packs). 

It's an interesting contrast in these two sessions.  In general the more exciting, well-received sessions seem to be the one that showed lots of code, code being written and few power point slides.  BillG and the other keynotes didn't have a lot of code being written since they're presenting general direction and announcements, etc.  But in the individual sessions I feel that code, code, code is the thing.  I'll keep this in mind for my own customer presentations.

Wed PM

Wed night was the Attendee Party at Universal Studios.  It was really cool and everything was free.  I met up with my friend Bill and one of his co-workers (David) and we went to the Mummy Returns, Backdraft and the Back to the Future Ride.  That's about all the time we had. 

One humorous point was an escalator ride where Don Box was getting the group around to chant something.  Here's my script from the event:

• Don: Okay everyone on 3, "Linux Sucks", 1...., 2...., 3....
• Crowd: "Linux Sucks" (Laughter)
• Guy behind me: "Who was that weirdo?"

Shortly after this Chris Anderson was getting the crowd to 'whoop' it up.

• Chris: "Come on everyone. Hoo, hoo, hoo!"
• Guy beind me: "Man, what is going on around here?"

I guess those two were really happy their sessions were done and they could relax.  Seriously though, they were both great presenters.  Any time you get a chance to listen to either or both of them, you should take advantage of the opportunity.

Thurs AM

I got back to the convention center this morning and finally got my Attendee bag.  Microsoft employees, even if paying full conference fee, weren't given the conference bag or materials (CDs with Longhorn, etc) when we checked in.  We deferred to real customers, given the fact that this conference was sold out (we didn't want to run out of materials for everyone else).

After that I wanted to attend the Longhorn panel discussion, but there was no room in the hall and little room outside.  I continued on to the CLR Internals discussion.  Luminaries sitting on stage holding court musing on memory models, architecture & platforms, language syntax, programming paradigms and where the CLR is headed.  Very informative, but I must confess I started typing this blog entry and, like very bad laptop users I didn't pay much attention.

Goodbye LA, smog, fires, (really bad) traffic (compared to Seattle), ...

Now I'm heading to the airport, home, my family and bed.  Catch you later...