Under The Hood - Matt Pietrek

Just went to Herb Sutter's talk on C++ futures. Really rocking stuff! Check out the slides for TLN309. (Sorry, no link yet. I hope to update it when I get it.) The first few minutes were on general improvements to the language including future ISO...

Last night was the "Ask the experts" event. A huge buffet dinner for everyone, with several dozen large tables where the "experts" (meaning us MS folk) were grouped together by specialty areas. The attendees could wander between the tables, findings...

Cool new technology I wasn't aware of. Imagine drawing out your workflow (both machine and human components) in a boxes & arrows designer. You can then easily create CLR classes that represent each of your boxes. After implementing the code in...

Attended the lunchtime presentation by Rico Mariani on writing faster managed code. The cool thing I got out of it is that the CLR team has done most of it for you. A bunch of things including NGEN, iterating over generics and exceptions are just faster...

Just finished the keynote, followed by a quick spin around the exhibition hall. I'm in the Tools & Language track lounge. On the left side as you come in to the Big Room. Currently there's more MS people here than attendees, so feel free to come...

Been going batty trying to get my notebook to work DNS-wise with the wireless networks at the PDC. The network help desk people (scattered about in various booths) kindly showed me the "ipconfig /flushdns" command. It was able to get my network up...

I had faint hopes for a few seconds of being one of the first to blog about the power failure that hit LA and our convention center. After pointing my wife (back in Seattle) to the CNN home page, she was able to fill me in on what was going on. Folks...

The carpet in the "Tools and Languages" track lounge is unbelievably well padded. I think I could sleep on it. There's a scattered collection of tables in about a 20x20 area. Each table has a power strip and a couple of ethernet connetions for the...

Just attended a meeting for all the PDC staff. Since the schedules and names are still up in the air, it occurred to me that finding lil'ol me might be harder than it looks. Much as it would be cool, there's not a specific profiling/performance "Ask...

I started my own personal campaign inside Microsoft to go to the PDC many months ago. It was close, but I finally got the OK to go at the last possible second before registration closed. Since I've only missed one PDC since the first in 1992, I'm psyched...