Day Two Down - at PDC05
It was another great day here at PDC, truly. Tonight was a fun event at Universal Studios which capped the day off nicely.
I have to start by saying, though, I'm feeling a bit punchy as I'm very tired and have been fighting my network connection here, where I have seen speeds so slow I nearly wish to stab my eyes out! Isn't it funny how we are so accustomed to our speedy connections? Take it away for even a moment and our blood pressure rises, our teeth grit and we want to physically punish our hardware, through no real fault of its own.
Beyond this issue I have to say that tonight I have definitely been feeling some customer pain. I have an issue for the team back home that I'm trying to help investigate, and I need a very tiny piece of the PSDK. Only trouble is, I can't get any of the PSDK setups to work for me because of the tough time I'm having securing even a reasonable amount of bandwidth. So I've searched everywhere and can't just find the small piece I need separately. All points on MSN Search point to PSDK downloads. On the Microsoft intranet I hoped I'd find a stray copy, but nope, all points to PSDK. I can't even get remote desktop working to my machine, where I do have the tool installed. It is incredibly frustrating, and I feel your pain!!!
So what happened at PDC today? Well, we saw a couple of very cool announcements - for Expression tools and for Visual Studio Tools for Applications. We had a lot of customer interest in the track lounge on these today. Generally we didn't have as good of a mix in the track lounge today, in terms of Microsoft staff, and it made it hard to get customers directed to the right people. Fortunately most folks were understanding and would just try to drop by later in the day. I don't think we had as many customers come through today, but there was a lot going on in terms of sessions and I am confident that is why. Tomorrow night we have the Ask the Experts, and I'm sure that will be quite busy.
Speaking of feeling your pain, I had to go from one end of the conference to the other today, and boy was that a walk! It took me 10 minutes of some serious crowd navigation just to get where I needed to be. I know that some of the events in the smaller rooms on one end required signing up for an appointment, so you could find yourself walking from one end, to the other where you signed up, back again and then once more for your actual meeting. That could be a lot of trekking! Still, it is better than two years ago when a lot of customer meetings were taking place in hotels.
Today I didn't really get much in the way of themes for common questions, but I do have two small bits of info to share with you PDC attendees out there:
1) The C++ IDE Tips and Tricks session that was supposed to take place on Tuesday at lunch has been rescheduled for Thursday at 1pm in 406AB,
2) The RC bits you are hearing about should be available at the material distribution booths after the keynotes.
Cool, yo'. Til Tomorrow.
