AllenD's WebLog : PDC

PDC Day 4 - Miles and miles

AllenD — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:09:00 GMT

The last day of the conference...

It's always so strange on the last day of a conference. Everyone from Microsoft is much more relaxed. Things are already being packed up (like the product pavilion. I listened in on a few of the panels this morning and will be going to a panel on Agile Development.

During breakfast I talked with a gentleman who really is excited about VS 2005 and loves our development environment. Intellisense and the great debugger are his favorite features. When I asked him what he'd like us to do in the future and what he'd like to see fixed, he didn't have an answer. Basically all he could come up with was to get things shipped faster. That's great validation for all we do in the Developer Division. I'm will looking for some more critical feedback, but the impressions I have a extremely positive and the developer community is totally energized around the Microsoft platform(s).

Pedometer facts...

I've been wearing my pedometer the entire week here at PDC 05. Here are the latest statistics:

Total Distance	13.38 mi (21.54 km)
Total Steps	36,885
Calories burned	1586.1

My feet are really tired from a lot of walking and standing during the week. I can't believe I racked up over 13 miles in distance this week.

It's time for me to say good by from PDC 05. I'll be blogging as VS 2005 ramps up to ship and the VS SDK continues to be improved. Thanks for reading.

Allen

PDC Day 3 - Experts, experts, everywhere

AllenD — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:24:00 GMT

C# Futures was packed...

So I ended up in an overflow room. Listening to Anders Hejlsberg talk about delegates, anonymous methods, lambda expressions, generics, etc. was very cool. It's really interesting all the things that needed to be done to the C# language in order to make the LINQ (Language Integrated Query) syntax work.

Dynamic Languages in the CLR...

I then attended the lecture on dynamic languages in the CLR. First there was a demo of some loosely coupled VB code (late-binding) and then a demonstration of Iron Python for .NET. This was really cool. I remember seeing this about a year ago and wondering where it would end up. Finally the lecture ended with a demo of Lightweight Code Generation (LCG) features of the CLR 2.0. It's really easy to generation IL code using some help from the framework and get the IL to run in the context of the application on the fly. Interesting implications for scripting languages and dynamic languages with little to no type safety. You don't always have to compile everything ahead of time. (More about LCG at Joel Pobar's blog.)

64-bit Gaming...

I spent a little time getting killed (mostly) playing "Far Cry" on some AMD 64-bit hardware. Totally fun...

Ask the Experts...

Tonight was the Ask the Experts session and there were a ton of Microsoft experts in attendance to provide answers to customer questions. It was very crowded and there were lots of customers asking questions. This was by far the best organized Ask the Experts I've been to since I started attending trade shows. Every expert group had a table and there was a good directory for customers and us to follow. There were plenty of times when I had to walk a customer to another table, but having the index really helped.

As we were leaving Anders Hejlsberg was discussing topics at a whiteboard with about 20 people hanging around him. Some were taking pictures. The rest of us are amateurs compared to him when it comes be being an expert. I guess they could have called it "Ask *The* Expert".

Pedometer facts...

I've been wearing my pedometer the entire week here at PDC 05. Here are the latest statistics:

Total Distance	12.32 mi (19.83 km)
Total Steps	33,960
Calories burned	1456.9

Tomorrow is the last day of the show and I'm looking forward to getting back home to my family. I'll be blogging my last moments here in Los Angeles tomorrow. See you then...

Allen

PDC Day 3 - Domain Specific Languages - the future of Modeling

AllenD — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:13:00 GMT

Bob Muglia's General Session - Windows Server...

I just got out of Bob Muglia's keynote and it was great to see so many cool things happening in the Windows Server product. In particular I was impressed with IIS7 and it's capabilities. They designed an extensibility mechanism in IIS that allows an admin to completely control the modules that are used/loaded for the website as well as capability for a developer to modify the default capabilities of the modules there. What was shown was a different kind of directory listing that actually was a set of thumbnails for the images in the directory listing. Very cool...

Modeling and Visual Studio Team System...

As some of you know we have plans to include the team system modeling technologies API's in the VS SDK. I wanted to attend Jochen Seemann's presentation here at PDC in order to gauge the level of excitement and need for extensibility in order to be certain we provide the best SDK possible. By the size of the crowd (about 1500 people), I'd say that the modeling space is definitely huge and a lot of people are very excited/curious about what we're doing in this space. DSL isn't something to do with broadband or cable-modems. Domain Specific Languages is what we're talking about. Jochen had a quote: "A picture is worth a thousand words...but it's often the case that one doesn't know what the thousand words are." The vision for DSL tools is to instantiate the modeling tools exactly for a custom domain with our tools. We want to give the customer the freedom to express their domain since they are the experts in their domain. The DSL tools are on the web (as of Friday) on the MSDN site at Microsoft.com. You can see some modeling tools today in VS 2005 in the class designer, web service designer and the deployment designer. The DSL tools are designed to provide a toolkit for creating designers for Visual Studio. The DSL tools allow one to use the drawing surface, toolbox, property browser, explorer and validation. The modeling platform includes the following components: In-memory graph database (Domain Model), Drawing Surface (objects (shapes), connectors, auto-layout, routing, all customizable, etc.), Template Engine (for artifact generation), Shell Framework (Visual Studio UI integration - toolbox/menus), Validation Framework (checks constraints and guides user to resolve errors). The roles involved in modeling for software are Architect, Developer and Business Analyst). All of these roles can use MS provided designers, but there are several domains where MS won't provide designers and 3rd parties will provide them. The cool thing is that all of the models based on the platform will be able to work together and link artifacts and designers together.

During the session, Jochen designed a Simple Activity Language. He took 3 steps:

Define domain model (what do the shapes mean on the drawing surface, properties, states, inheritance relationships and behavior relationships, the meta-model)
Define the notation (decompose the language to basic units) - describe the shapes and connectors physical properties (text position, icons, colors, etc)
Define visualizations of the model via the notation elements

This works for really complex models as well as a simple one (like Jochen did on stage). As a side effect of this process you get a real nice specification of the language. To interact with the designer you write code for code/artifact generation, custom serialization, validation/constraints and custom behavior. This code can take advantage of the DSL SDK (that's the thing we want to provide in the VS SDK in the future).

The Toolkit generates a project that is actually a VS Package. It allows the package to launch in the Experimental hive. In the Exp hive we then create diagrams and manipulate the diagram with the design surface according to the model defined in the regular hive. In the demo Jochen then added a property to one of the shapes, rebuilt the model designer and showed again the Exp hive manipulating the designer and see the property he added.

One of the cool things is that the model database is able to be queried via a language and the API generated by the tool for the domain model.

If one can generate a single designer, one can generate multiple designers. What the modeling platform provides is a nice way to make multiple designers work together. A 'software factory' can generate and link these multiple designers. The DSL tools provide a tool window that allows one to create a table consisting of the rows and columns of shapes from two different designer surfaces. The table is then used to add dependencies with a check mark to associate elements from one model to elements from another.

Another cool feature of this toolkit is the linkage with the class diagram and code. With just a couple of clicks one can go from a use case domain shape, to a class object in the class designer to the code.

One of the final thing that Jochen did was to invite a partner (EDS) on stage to show their application which was driven with models during development. The EDS application had a bunch of code generators and stuff from about 4 years ago that generates applications for a 3-tier application using business logic, front end and the database. EDS wrote an add-in that generates a solution based on the models. It uses the API's of the DSL tools and the model. The solution generation add-in creates the front end code, unit tests (including a testing database with random data for testing), database scripts, stored procedures and links everything together using the business logic. The unit tests, by the way, are run by Visual Studio Team System Test.

For the future the DSL toolkit is planned for early 2006. Version 2 will include even tighter VS integration in the next version of VS after VS 2005.

Get more information at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/workshop/dsltools

Allen

Visual Studio and Windows Workflow Designer rocks! - PDC Day 2

AllenD — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:26:00 GMT

At the morning keynote I saw a great integration with Visual Studio in the Windows Workflow Designer. I'm sitting in the PDC general session this morning and during Eric Rudder's keynote he invited the Windows Workflow Foundation team to demonstrate their cool tools. The really awesome thing that I saw was a great design surface for work flow objects in a graphical form. To seal the deal the demo showed debugging the work flow directly in Visual Studio and seamlessly interacting with the usual C# debugger. The workflow debugger was completely graphical with a little breakpoint glyph attached to the workflow object. There were also 'callstacks' of the work flow objects and properties of the selected work flow objects showing current state to allow debugging the workflow and the code at the same time. This is hugely powerful and really shows off how awesome the Visual Studio platform is.

Another big deal at this session was the Microsoft Expression suite of applications that allow graphic design, web site design and interactive designers to work together. They aren't hosted in Visual Studio (they do share some aspects via common project files), but one can easily see how lots of aspects of those tools can be integrated. For now, they are separate tools.

If you are at the PDC today, please stop by the Tools and Languages Track Lounge. I'll be hanging out there most of the day. At 2:00 pm those of us from the VS Extensibility team that are here are scheduled for a "meet the team" event. Please stop by and say hello.

Blog to you later...

Allen

PDC Day 1 - Power Outages and Uploads

AllenD — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:05:00 GMT

Well, yesterday was very eventful.

Just after my previous post, we broke for lunch and just as we were starting to present our after-lunch information the power went out in Los Angeles. Not just in the Convention Center, but all over the city. According to reports 2 million people were affected. It was an interesting 30-45 minutes as we sat around in the dark (a little bit of illumination from ambient light). We finally got up on stage and did some general Q&A. The power finally came back on and we were able to continue our preconference session without further incident.

During my portion of the precon, I wrote a To Do Manager from scratch (ok, practically from scratch). This is the same demo that I did at the Dev Lab in August on campus. The code for this demo has been posted on GotDotNet. This code project requires the Sep 05 CTP of the VS SDK and is expected to work with Visual Studio 2005. I wrote it using a recent VS 2005 release candidate (internal), but it should work with any VS 2005 RTM Release Candidate.

After the precon our VS partner program hosted a little party at Dodger Stadium for a few partners. The Dodgers did very well and it was a nice treat to see a big league game in a beautiful stadium. It was fun talking with partners and letting our hair down a little bit.

This morning I attended BillG's and JimAll's keynotes. They were both very good. Don Box, Chris Andersen, Scott Guthrie and Anders Hejlsberg were very good as usual. Windows Vista is awesome, our programming model and frameworks are really powerful and it is truly a great time to be a software developer.

Fun facts: My pedometer is still going. Totals for the week as of Tue morning: 5.49 miles, 15136 steps. Since the last report this represents 2.88 miles walked.

PDC Day 0 - Precon

AllenD — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 21:07:00 GMT

Hello. I'm sitting in 501ABC for the PDC05 Preconference Session on Visual Studio Extensibility.

If you are coming to the PDC, please drop by and say hello!

I, along with Phil Taylor, Doug Hodges, Craig Skibo, am presenting information today. We have 6 hours of content to talk about VS Extensibility, VS Architecture and demo a bunch of code.

I'm going to be at various partner and extensibility related events during PDC05. If you need to get in touch with me, please try email or the PDC comm net site. We have a booth in the pavillion, a hands-on lab and I'll also be in the Tools and Languages Track Lounge most of the time. There's also an Ask The Experts session on Thursday night. I'll be leaving LA on Friday. Hope to see you here.

Curious facts: This week I'm wearing a pedometer full time to see how far I end up walking. I started wearing it on Sunday afternoon as I entered the airport in Seattle. As of Monday 11:10 am I've walked 2.61 miles (7215 steps) in 1:29 hours.

VSIP Dev Lab

AllenD — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:18:00 GMT

We just completed another Dev Lab on the Microsoft campus. This is an event for partners to bring their VS integrations on campus and have Microsoft help them get their code working with the latest platforms.

In this case we have several partners that are getting ready to launch their integrated tools when we launch VS 2005 later this year.

For me, it was a hectic time since I had just returned from a road-trip vacation in Califorinia the week before and had 2 presentations to give during the week.

I returned home on Friday night (late) and worked over the weekend for my Monday morning presentation. Then I worked on my second presentation on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday morning I gave that presentation. I was much more relaxed after having given that final presentation.

The first presentation was kind of a Sprint review over the last few Sprints to get direct customer feedback and what should be in the VS SDK. I showed the Product Backlog and demo'd some of the new samples in the SDK. We got a lot of good feedback that we will immediately begin taking action on to give customers what they asked for. Some of the same information is already public on the VSIPDev.com site.

The second presentation I delivered was a dry-run of a presentation I'm giving at PDC in Sept for the Visual Studio Extensiblity Pre-conference Session. (By the way the PDC is sold-out.) This presentation was a walk-through of the Managed Package Framework and I spent a great deal of time during the session writing code demonstrating an integration that took advantage of the strengths of the managed packge framework.

The integration that I wrote on stage was a To-Do Manager tool that used a Tool Window, the Property Browser, Task List, Tool/Options Dialog all in a Windows Form. Pretty cool. I will be blogging more about that project since it revealed a few technical areas that need some explanation and I had to come up with a workaround or two to some limitations in VS and the Managed Package Framework.

By the way, our August Sprint is coming to a close and we'll likely be providing a preview of the VS SDK as a result with some of the newest sample code. In addition to the reference samples for C# Package and C# MenuAndCommands from last month, we've added following reference samples: C++ Package, C++ MenuAndCommands and C# Services. We're still working on that last 3 on our list C++ Tool Window, C# Tool Window and C++ Services.

I'll be blogging more about the VS SDK in the future as well.

Thursday PDC Report

AllenD — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 20:17:00 GMT

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...

Tue Report

AllenD — Wed, 29 Oct 2003 07:50:00 GMT

Mon Night

Monday night we had a reception in the Expo Hall and there were a lot of people around. We gave out a bunch of VSIP t-shirts and VSIP 2003 SDK bits, including the Everett Extras bits.

We continue to have some really interested customers who are learning of the new VSIP (it’s free now) for the first time. There are also a number of customers who are learning, for the first time, that the beta of Everett Extras is available publicly. We had one customer come by and I showed him how easy it was to incorporate a .NET User Control into a VS Tool Window. He was totally enthusiastic at how easy it was to accomplish. This gave me the opportunity to demonstrate the beta wizard for generating a VSIP package. I’m really excited about Everett Extras and the whole VSIP team (especially the developers whom I work closely with) should be very proud of what’s being done to enable customers to solve problems and integrate their really neat features into VS.

Tue AM

I sat in on Eric Rudder’s keynote. The audience was very enthusiastic about new features in VB, ASP.NET, Smart Devices and other newly announced products that integrate into VS.

I did more booth duty this morning after the keynote and things have definitely slowed down. We got rid of the t-shirts and now only the most serious of customers are dropping by. With nothing free to give away, except a CD with SDK bits, people aren’t as interested in hearing about VSIP and VS Extensibility. It is good, however, to get the serious questions and have time to actually demo some of the bits for potential and existing partners.

Tue Noon

I sat in on Adam Nathan and Sonja Keserovic for their session on Managed/Native Interoperability. Adam literally wrote the book on this topic. He was giving his book away with signature for lucky attendees who answers certain quiz questions correctly. (For the record, I could answer these, but I held back for the benefit of real customers.) This was a great talk and it got me thinking that we’ve got more work to do in VSIP to make sure that we don’t fall into the traps that were demonstrated in the session and to make it easy for our VSIP partners to avoid them as well.

After this I went back to the booth and answered questions, demo’d EvEx some more and generally couldn’t wait to get off my feet.

We had the opportunity to sample some of the fine steak of downtown LA. Craig, Ken, Doug, Tom, Chris and my good friend Bill took a ride to one of the local establishments and enjoyed a nice dinner.

Tue PM

After dinner, Ken, Doug and I went to meet with an existing partner to demo their upcoming product and to talk about possible future directions. It was a good demo and they’ve got a great product. I wish I could say more, but you’ll just have to wait ‘til they go to market with this and then I’ll include more here.

The hotel we went to was the Standard Hotel in LA. The sign outside the hotel was upside down. I had a feeling this was anything but ‘standard’. Inside (on the 5’th floor at least) we found room labels that said “My name is: 503” instead of the traditional “Room 503”. There were also is labels on the stairs that said, you guessed it, “My name is: stairs”. One of the rooms had been hastily converted to a “conference room”. The bed was still there as well as the funky modern furniture. The shower had no door and it was a completely white room (tile, furniture, fixtures, bedding, walls, everything). It felt more sterile than a hospital. I was happy to get out of there and will never stay there when I travel, that's for sure. Maybe some people like that kind of thing, but it was fairly bad in my opinion.

I finally made it back to the Convention Center with only 30 minutes left in the Ask The Experts session, but managed to learn of some cool Whidbey bugs customers have found and talk to some customers about Extensibility and VSIP.

I took the opportunity to introduce myself to Adam and Sonja whom I have exchanged some emails with, but have never actually said ‘hello’ to. I’m sitting in the Tools & Languages Lounge now, waiting for the Birds of a Feature session on Managed/Native Interop to see what’s going on with others who do the same things that my team does.

Fires

This morning I looked at the TV News and it looked pretty grim. The fires are still spreading and threatening even more populated areas. The smoke & haze outside the Convention Center was even worse today than yesterday. I estimate visibility to be less than 1 miles. No one on the streets seemed to be alarmed at this. SoCal attitude I suppose.

Traveling to PDC (Planes, Cancellations & Automobiles)

AllenD — Tue, 28 Oct 2003 02:38:00 GMT

I'm sitting in the Tools & Languages Community Lounge at the PDC here in Los Angeles. It's nice & warm outside with hazy skies from smoke & ash. Even the Southern Californian's don't want to go outside. There's ash falling outside, but it's comfortable in the enormous LA Convention Center. There isn't a seat available in the lounge. It's incredibly crowded and the wireless network just came back online (a rogue access point blasted traffic off the net). There's an X-Box kiosk nearby with Halo being played so the sounds are very nice (shooting, screams, aliens, vehicles, monastic music).

But let me start with yesterday...

SeaTac

Sun 11:20am (SeaTac)

Arrived at SeaTac with 2 hours 'til my flight to find that it had been cancelled. I calmly stand in line for a long time and finally learn that SoCal wild fires have caused air traffic delays. No big deal, I think, since I have a while to get there. I'll just take the next flight. Riiiiigggghhhht.

My 1:20pm flight was cancelled and there's nothing available. All the airports in SoCal have been affected since a FAA air traffic facility had to be evacuated and control eventually shifted to Palmdale (high alt desert). Pandemonium at SeaTac. People can only stay nice so long and things are now getting nasty at the ticket counter. I vow to be nice instead of yelling at the ticket agent like that woman in front of me.

The agent looks all over the state for a suitable better flight with seats open. San Francisco, San Jose & Fresno are all booked. There's a flight to Sacramento (Arnold Schwarzeneger's new home-town) at 4:45pm. Well, if it's the closest, then I guess I'll have to take it. I figure I'm fortunate to have found a flight getting me 300 miles within my original destination.

Sun 4:45pm (SeaTac)

A nice uneventful flight to California (central CA).

Road Trip!

Sun 7:30pm (Sacramento)

Turns out Scott Swanson (VS) and Steve Hiskey (Windows Security) got the same flight after I told them about it and we all decide to take my car (Avis was very helpful getting my reservation changed last-minute) down to SoCal. They got booked later and the only seats left were First Class. Go figure!

Scott is a PM on the VS Core team in the Help/Community space. No sessions this PDC in his area, but he is doing some focus groups on VS Whidbey Help.

Steve is a speaker with sessions on the Next Generation Secure Computing Base. Fascinating stuff!

We travel south very close to my home town and some very familiar landscape.

Mon 1:30am (Los Angeles)

6 hours and 300 miles later we end up in downtown LA. It's 1:30 AM and there isn't a car to be seen on any SoCal roads or freeways. I don't know why people complain about the traffic here.

I finally find my hotel after dropping off Scott and Steve and collapse. If you ever have a chance to stay at the Park Hyatt LA in Century City (next to Beverly Hills) I highly recommend it. Very posh compared to the Adam's Mark Hotel where I stayed for Tech*Ed Dallas. Park Hyatt is even on the MS approved list of hotels so I don't feel bad spending the company's money (I guess I'm getting the corporate rate).

Fire!

You have heard about these California Wilde Fires. Well, we saw them from I-5 near Magic Mountain (Valencia). Pretty cool (well, not the fact that so many homes have been lost and even some deaths), but wild fires are fairly exciting even still. Those were the only flames we saw, despite imagining the drive would be more harrowing or there would be roads blocked, etc. It is a little eerie as I write this and look outside to see a sky rich with an orange/brown hue.

Keynote & Demos

Mon 9:00am

Running on 4 hours sleep I get to the PDC just in time for the Bill Gates and Jim Allchin keynote addresses. Really cool demos of Longhorn, Avalong and Indigo. (But they didn't schedule a bathroom break.)

The only thing I was irritated with during these two sessions was Don Box and Chris Anderson's insistence on using emacs & visual slickedit. Even Jim got in on the act and used vi. The whole time I'm thinking "VS blows these editors away for productivity! What are they thinking?!!!". (Visual SlickEdit does have some cool features, though). Finally they did bring up VS and was it cool to see intellisense, statement completion, F5 launching, etc. The VS IDE is something that my product unit can be proud of. Don and Chris did finally concede that "there is something about this VS thing that might just catch on". (Groan)

Tradeshow booth

Mon 12:00pm

Finally I meet up with one of my best friends (Bill develops for a network storage company - something like that). We have lunch early and Ester allows me to change my badge from Attendee to Microsoft Staff. This let's me get into the Trade Show area early so I can at least setup before talking with customers.

We handed out free VSIP SDK (including the Extras Beta) CD's and engaged a lot of new potential partners. It's really exciting to finally get to show Everett Extras to customers. They really like the easy integration that the managed interfaces allow.

We got some good feedback on the IDE from one customer (some tool box suggestions I'll deliver to the IDE team when I get back to Redmond).

Mon 4:37pm

My feet are killing me after standing for 3 hours straight, now my sitting side hurts after having to sit on the floor to type this (all the chairs are taken).

I'm going to pop in for the first part of the MSBuild talk.

After that, I'll have 2-3 more hours of booth duty to engage customers and consider integrating their solutions into VS as well as a partner event 'til 11pm. I hope I can make it that long. Check back here for an update when I have the next opportunity (and thanks for reading all this drivel up to this point).