AprilR's WebLog : PDC

PDC05 Fun Question of the Day

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 10:21:00 GMT

Today a customer asked me a fun question: What does Birds of a Feather mean?

I had fun answering this question, and I thought it would be fun to post it here. There is an old expression "birds of a feather flock together," which is actually a part of an old nursery rhyme, and simply means that people and animals tend to hang around those who are similar to them. Conferences often offer or include sessions called Birds of a Feather (BOF) where a group of people get together to discuss an issue or topic that is common to them. In many cases these are sessions suggested and voted on by the community of attendees and may or may not be facilitated by the sponsoring company or organization.

PDC05 Day Three!

AprilR — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 09:49:00 GMT

Before I get started I want to point out a couple of items for tomorrow:

1) Herb Sutter's 10:30a.m. talk about C++ futures
2) The Meet the Visual C++ team event in the Tools and Languages track lounge at 1:30p.m.

I've started to see a few C++ specific questions come up frequently, so I'm sharing them with you:

"When will you have support for TR1?"
A: The TR1 specification adds certain class and function templates to the standard library. While we haven't added this support to our implementation of the standard library in the 2005 release, we have made sure the compiler will support them.

"What is the current state of the C++/CLI specification?"
A: I'm still learning about the standardization process myself, but relative to the process the specification is getting closer and closer to done. Herb Sutter posted about this in June.

"When can we expect C++/CLI support in the in the .NET Compact Framework?"
A: This is an interesting question for a couple of reasons. In some ways, the C# and VB support there makes a lot of sense since I think there are primarily web applications that are taking advantage of the framework. At the same time, we are senstive to the fact that once again legacy applications and components are written in C++. A good place to watch for this type of news is on Ami'ts blog.

"What is the future of MFC? Will you be doing any innovation there in the future?"
A: Steve Teixeira provide a short document in June on this, but the short answer is yes, we will continue to help customers move their MFC assets forward and be winning applications and components on Windows.

"I haven't upgraded to 2005 yet - will upgrading be painful? Is it backwards compatible?"
A: While every project is different, and your results may vary :), I have to say that we have seen a lot of success in getting customer projects upgraded in less than a day. That said, there are many changes that you will want to make as you get resources, for instance moving to the more secure CRT functions. This documentation will help educate you on the changes and issues you may face in moving to 2005.

As far as the PDC today, I spent a few hours in the lounge steering people to experts, and then a few hours at the Ask the Experts session answering C++ questions. The Ask the Experts session is a catered event where there are hundreds of tables marked with various technologies and products where Microsoft staffers and other experts hang out and answer questions, or chat with customers about everything from here to there. One odd site tonight was a giant cupcake. I'm not sure what the point of it was! I suppose it did probably draw attention to the nearby dessert table, but it still seemed a bit bizarre :) What wasn't bizarre was the giant Channel 9 Guy who I of course gave a big hug and got a snapshot.

Day Two Down - at PDC05

AprilR — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:30:00 GMT

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.

Day 1 of PDC05!

AprilR — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 10:59:00 GMT

Well today was the first day of PDC, and it is off to a great start. I have to say my favorite part is meeting the broad spectrum of customers, partners and even other Microsoft employees that I don't normally interact with. This year my primary job at the PDC is helping customers and Microsoft folks connect in the lounge dedicated to the Tools and Languages Sessions Track. This track primarily features the Visual Studio teams in all of the various forms. We have a 30' by 40' space with tables, chairs, couches and several white boards, along with a podium that we use as a sort of concierge location, and we help get customers in touch with the experts they are looking for. I missed the keynotes because I was finishing some last setup work in the lounge, and so I got there around 9:00a.m. and left our last customers of the day at 9:20p.m. Since most of us didn't take time to eat all day, some of us from the Visual C++ team got together for dinner at the revolving cocktail lounge at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. We talked about the customer issues we had heard during the day, about running as normal users on our home computers, then moved on to politics, the safety of hotel rooms, about our dev manager's experience many years ago when Bill Gates acknowledged him by name at a party, and then we were back on to work topics (loader lock issues). Then my thoughtful teammates walked me back to my hotel for my safety and, after relaxing a bit, here I am.

The most common general questions I answered today were:

"Where is the LINQ Whitepaper?"

A: We have lots of handouts, and I'm sure there are plenty of links online by now. People are stoked about what Don and Anders presented this morning.

"What do I have to do to get a hat?"
A: Take one out of the bin :)

"Where can I get a copy of the .NET Framework 2.0 poster?"
A: Turns out this will be in the Visual Studio box; for MSDN subscribers I'm finding out the plan here and will post back.

"Where is the ILL01 session?"
A: This is an Instructor Lead Lab and can be found on the big screens in the Hands on Labs area in the Big Room

"Which bits are in the pack we got and where is the RC?"
A: Jason Sutherland was a great resource for everyone who had questions about magic bits, and which went with which, and when others of this and that would be available. The media attendees got today has a variety of things that are currently building on the Beta 2 of Visual Studio, so Beta 2 of Visual Studio is what was included. Now, all this is great, but folks have had Beta 2 for awhile and are interested in seeing the near-final bits/RC of Visual Studio. These are already available on MSDN subscriptions downloads and attendees will get this media this week as well.

"So what's new in Whidbey/2005 for C++ developers? Which sessions should I attend?"
A: Blog readers know that my earlier posts talk about the first question, even if only generally right now. For sessions, check out our recommendations for the days that are all still to come (today's lunch sessions are being rescheduled):

TLN309 C++: Future Directions in Language Innovation with Herb Sutter
TLNL02 Tips & Tricks: Productivity Tips for the Visual C++ 2005 IDE
TLNL04 Tips & Tricks: C++ Optimization Best Practices
FUN318 Windows Vista: Using Win32/WinFX Integration to Light-Up on Windows Vista: A Case Study
PRS313 Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): Integrating with Your Win32/MFC Application
Hands on Lab: Integrating MFC and Windows Forms

So what else has been going on? I only stopped by the pre-conference sessions yesterday, as I was setting up. Before that it has proven to be an interesting trip for me! I have gotten lost on every single trip on L.A. freeways, but I've seen a lot of the area. I paid extra to upgrade my rental car to a convertable and it only took one day to get a sunburn :) I played golf for the first time in over three years (how is a 56 on a 9 hole par 3? not great! but I had a blast). I rented a bicycle and rode around the ever entertaining Venice Beach, drove through Beverly Hills and on the Sunset Strip and even saw the real Hollywood sign, which was fun. I absolutely adore my hotel - the Millenium Biltmore. It is a gorgeous art deco hotel with rich, albeit relatively recent compared to other parts of the country and planet, Hollywood and political history dating from the early 1900s. My room is classic and quaint, and I'll be back here again if I get a chance. Monday, as you may have heard, we had the fun of a short power outage in all of L.A., and I was very happy that I missed getting onto an elevator by only a moment. I took the stairs down from my 9th floor room, but did have an adventure actually finding my way out to the lobby and street, as many doors were locked and I had to play guess and check with routes and doors. Thank heavens it wasn't a fire situation (knocking on wood now!).

That's it. That's my PDC update for day 1. See you tomorrow!

On My Way to PDC05

AprilR — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:17:00 GMT

I can't tell you how busy we have been over the past few months, back in building 41, getting Visual C++ 2005 ready to go. It is always at this late stage in the game where complex issues and interesting bugs find their way onto our collective plate and one by one we investigate and do what we think is best for our customers (which sometimes means waiting to fix it right in the next release to avoid risk now).

But today, I get to think about how much fun I'm going to have next week. By day I've been helping the team to ship Whidbey, and by night I've been helping organize the design and staff for the Tools and Languages track lounge. We're going to have a great time.

Next week thousands of developers and hundreds of Microsoft engineers will come together to talk about what's new, what's hot and what get's everybody jazzed about the future in software. I hope you are going to be there, too, because the energy at this conference is amazing.

I haven't forgotten that I owe you all the rest of the C++ tour content. I hope to be getting to that very soon, but for the next week I'll be reporting to you live from the PDC in L.A. I leave tomorrow and have about twenty things on my to do list for tonight, so I'm going to get some coffee.

- AprilR