jamespr's WebLog : MEDC 2005

MEDC 2005 - Day One Summary

jamespr — Wed, 11 May 2005 23:29:00 GMT

What a day! Everything at BillG's keynote went very smoothly. Our demo team excelled themselves and Bill seemed happy when he came off stage. You can watch the webcast at : http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

Sessions have been very busy. I've been surprised by the popularity of some of the sessions. We really tried to beef up the Enterprise and Business content this year and it's paid off. I've been pleasantly surprised by the attendance on both tracks. The Windows CE Lab has been CRAZY. Based on the session preference survey data we had already doubled the capacity of that room AND repeated the sessions.

We had a huge turnout in the Ask The Experts session last night. If you were at the session, I hope you were able to get all your questions answered. The exhibit hall is packed with over 40 exhibitors/sponsors.

A few hundred lucky attendees were at the premiere of The Code Room. Next Thursday we will have it posted up on www.thecoderoom.com for the rest of the world to watch. Feedback on the premiere was very positive and there was a huge throng of people arouind our contestants Jim Wilson, Doug Boling, Sean Liming and Mike Hall. Paul Murphy - creator of The Code Room - was at the premiere with technical host Rory Blyth.

We ended the day with a rehersal for Suzan DelBene's session this morning! More to come...

James

MEDC Keynote Has Left The Building!

jamespr — Tue, 10 May 2005 21:07:00 GMT

Bill's just come off stage. The keynote is over and we're all happy! Look out for some podcast footage of backstage on www.medc2005.com/podcast! We hope you enjoyed the show. Let us know what you thought!

James

MEDC - 20 minutes to showtime

jamespr — Tue, 10 May 2005 19:43:00 GMT

I'm sat backstage at the keynote with 20 minutes to go until showtime. We rehearsed last night with Bill which seemed to go well. We just finished our final rehearsal and doors are now open so me and the demo team are sat backstage getting ready to get out there. Don't forget, you can watch the show at :

http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

See you in a few hours.

James

Pre-precon Day at MEDC

jamespr — Mon, 09 May 2005 01:09:00 GMT

Yersterday was a strange day. Lots and lots of stuff arrived yesterday but not much had been setup. The lab machines were built yesterday but not imaged yet.

Today is a different story, everything is really starting to build out quickly! When I got here this morning around 9am one of the session rooms was already built out! Most of the other session rooms have some of the bits in them. Some have their podiums, some have the chairs, most have their screens up.

The keynote room is coming together. Right now it's a giant room with tape on the floor marking out where everything goes. Over the next few hours it's going to turn from a giant empty room into a keynote room with stages and backdrops. We've been discussing the final details of how many wolfvisions to use (hint : there may be devices in the keynote!). 3 of my 4 keynote demo team have arrived in town. I'm just waiting to hear from the last one and we should be good to go! We'll have a short practice today.

Right now, I'm sat in the crew room (where all the crew go and hang out and eat) which is the nerve center for the operation. Milissa our logistics and operations lead remains calm and as far as I can tell, everything is under control. We have a team of people stuffing bags so when attendees show up they have the right CDs and data sheets in there.

When I last went in the exhibit hall, they were just laying the carpet on the floor. A few of the exhibit stands had been built out already.

Our crack team of slide formatters has got underway. Our deadline for speakers to drop final slides to us was Friday. We had 96 of 113 decks dropped which is a pretty decent percentage. The slide team are now making sure all the slides can easily be read and are formatted consistently to keep it easy on attendees eyes. They also do things like expand abbreviations that aren't in common use to their proper length.

The cabana infrastructure is up. We have 3 areas and 6 whiteboards.

I've been in the crew room for a couple of hours ... time to venture out and see how everything has changed.

Final Preparations!

jamespr — Sun, 08 May 2005 04:51:00 GMT

OK. SO you might be wondering ... what on earth has James been doing for the last few weeks? Why no updates for so long? Well, the last few weeks of conference preparation are CRAZY! Here's some of the highlights :

Driving the Breakout Sessions To Completion

Each deck goes through a draft review, a dry run and then a final drop. There are 113 breakout sessions alone which means a lot of chasing of speakers and content owners to get things done. I'm pleased to report right now I have nearly 100 of those decks final and sat on a share waiting to be copied off to the folk who go through and make sure the slides are formatted properly, have the right TMs and Rs.

Finishing Up The Code Room

If you're registered, you'll know that one of our highlights is the excusive premier of the second episode of The Code Room. The Code Room is MSDNs reality TV show about developers. We filmed the new episode a few weeks back and have been going through edits to get 10s of hours of footage down to a tidy 30 minutes. I think all the effort was worth it. Things got pretty heated in there for a while and caused the normally mild mannered Jim Wilson to use the F word on a number of occasions. Needless to say that now got beeped.

Thanks to everyone at MS Studios and MSDN for helping us pull it together. Marc, Chris, Paul, Rory, Jessi, Neil, Mike, Jon, Anil and the production crew have done an amazing job.

The premier is at 9pm on Tuesday night after the exhibit hall opening. Tickets for the premier are limited. You can pick them up in sessions for asking great questions. There will also be secret spotters throughout the day who will be giving them out. If you can track me down, I might just have a few too :)

The Keynote

Ah the keynote. A disproportionate amount of work goes into the keynote given it's an hour and fifteen minutes in length. But then again, when you have your Chairman and Chief Software Architect delivering it things need to go well. I was running through the deck with our PR team yesterday and it's looking pretty good. My principle responsibility is the demo content. The demo team and I have been working on the demos for about 2 months now trying to make sure we've got all the avenues covered, that we're highlighting the key features and that we'll leave everyone psyched. We hope so. The real challenge has been deciding what not to cover. When you have a limited time budget it's hard to figure out what to put in as there's so much to talk about. I hope everyone enjoys it. It's been a lot of fun. I can tell you we (currently) have 5 demos planned. I say currently ... Mike Hall's voice was flaking on Friday so I hope we don't have to remove a demo! You can expect to see devices, tools, code and robots ... does there need to be anything else?

Internal Briefings

One important part of my role is making sure that everyone knows and understands what's going on during the event. That means a LOT of internal briefing sessions. Lots of questions to answer and I feel like I know this event better than anyone but I guess that's my job. This last week or so, I've briefed all the speakers as a group and then everyone from Microsoft who is coming to the event as another group. These meetings are important because, although I've been working on this for some time, it turns out most people aren't telepathic and hence can't read what's in my mind. Mostly I'm trying to help them help you the attendee have a great conference. It seems like pretty basic stuff but it's important everyone knows where things are, where they're supposed to be and when, who to contact if they can't answer a question etc etc We also gave them the exclusive first MEDC World Tour T-shirts. Something attendees will receive as a thank you for filling out your conference eval at the end of the conference!

The Core Slides

You know those slides that the speaker always says : My marketing team made me put these in? Yup, those are the core slides and this year, I'm the monkey responsible. Now when I put them together for MDC last year I think I went a little crazy and there where, maybe 7 or 8. Who wants to see the same slides 7 or 8 times? This year I've been a little more circumspect and have only created 4. The first slide is just a representation of all the technology on show at the conference so the speaker can orient the audience around what they're talking about. What was interesting about that slide was it made me realize the true breadth and depth of the technology we have in this space. From IT management tools to robust data stores to runtimes to tools to a set of GREAT development platforms. This also created a challenge in that there's a LOT to put on one slide! The other three slides are tail slides for reminding speakers to remind you to fill out evals. Evals are important because they're the only way our speakers get better. Be frank and honest. It is appreciated and listened to. As an attendee you can win instant prizes by filling out evals too through this new system we have this year. Other tail slides provide helpful resources to investigate after the show. Let me know after the conference how you feel about those 4 slides and what you think we should do with them next year.

Last Minute STUFF

You can never underestimate the number of questions you get in the last couple of weeks. Speakers, sponsors, staff and partners all have questions that it had never occurred to me to answer so I've spent a LOT of time plowing through those. I spent Friday rebuilding a couple of laptops with VS 2005 Beta 2 while I did some other stuff just in case a speaker needed one at the last minute. You've got to have thought of everything!

All the work has paid off I hope. I'm feeling good about the conference and can't wait for the halls to be filled with developers, it managers and business people!

See you in Vegas.

James

Special MEDC Blog Discount Expires 4/20. Sign Up Now!

jamespr — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 21:00:00 GMT

Don't forget tthat the special MEDC Blog Discount ends a 4/20 at 11:59PM PST!

To register for this special discounted price (an extra $100 of the Early Bird!) you need to :

* Visit www.medc2005.com

* Register using the RSVP code CAATTAR

James

MEDC Update (4/14/2005) Including New Registration Offer!

jamespr — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:06:00 GMT

OK. So first I realize that the color green is not that spectacular when paired with my orange skin. Fortunately for MEDC we have people with some sense of color co-ordination so everything will look good on site.

I can hardly believe we're at less than T-4 weeks from the conference. As you might imagine, things are motoring along at a fair old pace. Here's some of the highlights :

Brand New Blog Discount Code (CAATTAR)

Our last blog discount was so successful we thought we'd offer another one before the Early Bird discount expires. Currently if you register before April 20th you'll get a special price of $995 which is $200 off the standard registration fee. If you're one of the first 50 to register before April 20th with the RSVP code CAATTAR you'll get an EXTRA $100 off!

BillG Keynote

Demo preparations are proceeding well. We're already meeting twice weekly for run throughs and are trying to figure out all the different scenarios where something might go wrong so that we can avoid them! We're locked on our demo team (Ford, Seth, Neil and Mike) so it's just a question of practice practice practice from here until the day.

The Code Room

I don't know if you've seen "The Code Room" yet (http://www.thecoderoom.com) but it's a reality TV Show based around developers. We've been working with the production team to produce a new episode in time for MEDC based around Mobile and Embedded technologies. Four of our intrepid MVPs participated in the new code room challenge this week. You'll have to wait for the exclusive premier of The Code Room at MEDC to find out how they did but some of them have shared their experiences (Doug Boling, Jim Wilson, Sean Liming and Paul Yao).

Content and Sessions

If you hadn't already visited the content tool, I suggest you do! Go to http://content.medc2005.com/content/sessions.aspx to see the COMPLETE list of sessions being offered at MEDC US. That's 150 labs and breakouts across 3 days! I'll receive most of the draft decks tomorrow - if the speakers are behaving themselves. We'll then start reviewing the decks and providing feedback to try and create the best quality deck.

The session scheduling process is well underway. I anticipate we should be able to get that published as planned over the next week. At that point, if you're registered, you'll be able to start building your onsite agenda.

Microsoft Management Summit

A quick plug for one of our sister conferences! Microsoft Management Summit is next week in Las Vegas and also at The Mandalay Bay! Hopefully we'll be able to pick up some tips from them about the usage of the space for MEDC :-) I'll be down at MMS next week so keep an eye out for me and say hi if you see me!

http://www.mms2005.com/content/mmshome.aspx

See you in Vegas!

MEDC - Session Schedule

jamespr — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 06:32:00 GMT

Session abstracts ARE LIVE!!! Almost all of the session details are now published on http://content.medc2005.com/content/sessions.aspx

A few of you have asked me about the full session schedule for MEDC. If you've already signed up for MEDC you should have received a mail this weekend asking you to fill out the session preference survey. The session preference survey enables us to figure out what the most popular sessions are going to be so that we don't schedule very popular sessions against each other. The session preference survey closes on April 13th. I'll be working with our speaker manager to have an internal draft of the session schedule finished by April 16th. Session scheduling is a nightmare and could easily drive a normal person insane. Imagine trying to schedule 110 sessions over 8 concurrent timeslots over 3 days and making sure that logically people can go to all the sessions they want! Of course, once you've done it once you spot some sessions that you need to move around and THAT's when the craziness starts because one change usually starts a reaction of session moves.

The internal draft goes to the people who own blocks of sessions just to make sure we have sessions in a sensible order.

Plan is to have the schedule published latest April 22nd, hopefully sooner.

MEDC Blog Code Expired

jamespr — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 01:59:00 GMT

FYI The allocation of special blog passes to MEDC has just been used up. If you sign up today (March 29th) using standard registration you still get the bargain price of $895.

James

MEDC Update 3/25 - Blog discount about to expire

jamespr — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 03:42:00 GMT

So it's been a couple of weeks. I can honestly say that my workload has been CRAZY these last couple of weeks. What's interesting is that the excitement and momentum within Microsoft is really starting to pick up. I think everyone is looking forward to an awesome event and of course that means that everyone has questions about the event, how to sign up, how they can help out etc.

Blog Discount Expires 3/29 11:59PM PST

There are still a few of the special $715 blog discount codes available. Visit www.medc2005.com and use the RSVP Code CAATTAT.

The New Website - Did you spot the mistake?

Our new website went live 3/17. It had a thorough face lift to improve the flow and discoverablility of information based on feedback from some of you. Thanks! In that whole revamp, an error got introduced. Did you spot it yet? Yup, the keynote isn't at the same time as the Pre-Cons. Thanks to Sean, Dwayne and a number of others who pointed that out. The website agency have been asked to fix that ASAP.

The Keynote!

I had a meeting with the production team today. We discussed things like stage layout, what equipment we'd use, the backdrop and all sorts of interesting stuff. Of course, being the first time I've been responsible for a keynote of this size my main criterion are a) Does it look cool? b) Will it cost a small fortune.

I also got a mail from Bill's speech writer inviting me to run him through the demo plan for the keynote. Fortunately, we've been working on that for a number of weeks but it still makes it all seem a little more real. I'm certain I'll be more prepared for that meeting than I am for most. What? Me turn up for meetings with zero preparation? Never. Of course, at some point after that we'll have to run through the demos with "The Big Man" himself. Should be interesting.

Sessions

We'll have the abstracts up soon! I extended the deadline I'd set for the speakers to finalize them by a week because in the original plan they only had a week to think about it which didn't seem reasonable. The session levels are also queued up and ready to roll, they should appear sometime early next week.

You should find the session list is mostly complete. There's a few sponsor sessions I've yet to upload but apart from that, it's all there in it's glory. In the past, we've held off on some of the "new" stuff until we get to the conference but we thought we'd just put it all up there so you can see some of the exciting things we're going to cover.

Other Stuff

Did anyone see "The Code Room" (http://www.thecoderoom.com/) pilot that MSDN made a couple of months back? For those that didn't, it's a reality show based around giving developers a tough problem to solve and a time limit to do it in. We thought it was such a good idea that there's another one in the making and guess where it's being premiered? That's right, at MEDC! You'll also be able to watch last year's "The Developer" as well as "The Code Room" Pilot (if you haven't already seen it). Next week, we have a group of crack MSFT developers who are going to try the challenge to check that it's possible.

I think that's all for now. I'll be back next week, assuming I'm not too swamped again. Oh, and before I forget. Hi Josh. I never get a chance to talk to you in real time so I thought a HI through the blog would keep you going in the mean time!

James

MEDC Update - 3/10/2005 (including special registration offer!)

jamespr — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:22:00 GMT

Most important this week is a special offer. This will be being posted on a number of MSFT Mobile and Embedded blogs but you're getting it here first!

We're extending a special offer to blog readers! The first sixty people to sign up for MEDC 2005 using the RSVP Code CAATTAT get an extra 10% off our Super Early Bird price of $795. You only pay $715 which is a total savings of $480!

I expect noone is reading at this point as you're all off registering for the conference but just in case anyone is still there, after the weekend we should have the liust of speakers for the conference to add to the session titles. A couple of new sessions went live this week. One particularly interesting one is about MSP which is the interface to the Messenger server platform. Very cool stuff.

I've been working hard on some things around other deliverables for the conference. I can't say much but there'll be a new resource kit and that's consuming a lot of my time at the moment.

I got a glimpse today of one of the keynote demos. It's very cool. The dev who showed it to me was almost exploding with excitement. After he showed it to me, I was nearly exploding with excitement! It would spoil the surprise if I told you what it was but it uses lots of new features in creative ways!

James

MEDC Sessions Now Live!

jamespr — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:49:00 GMT

As promised, the session list is now live. Visit http://content.medc2005.com/content/sessions.aspx to see the 105 breakout sessions and 42 labs that make up MEDC 2005!

I've had a few queries from people in the last week via the blog, so I thought I'd answer them here :

Q : I'm a hardware engineer , will I be able to meet people to discuss hardware design with?

A : Most definitely. We'll be bring a bunch of people from our Windows CE team to the show.

Q : When will there be more information about the international events?

A : You can see dates and locations on http://www.medc2005.com/worldwide.html. We'll add local websites including registration as we get them. The US event is the primary event carrying over 100 breakout sessions. International events will be "best of" events carrying a much smaller selection of sessions and few MSFT attendees. If you want breadth and depth of content and want to meet lots of MSFT people, come to the US event!

Q : Will there be 64-bit Windows Embedded content at the show?

A : No. Not this year!

MEDC Update - 2/25/2005

jamespr — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 22:06:00 GMT

It looks like these updates are coming out approximately weekly. This week was HUGE for MEDC. We hit a couple of major milestones :

MEDC Registration Site

The website and registration site went live this week. Visit http://www.medc2005.com to find out why you should join us in Vegas and when you decide you want to come you can click right on through to register. Congrats to Allison for getting all this pulled together. Along with the site going live, the first wave of demand generation eMail went out. Unfortunately, due to a small snafu in the way it was sent Allison's mailbox received all the "mail address not available" eMails rather than the temporary mailbox she had set up. This of course caused her mailbox to go into meltdown for an afternoon.

Session Triage

I think I mentioned last week that we were having the final session triage this week. The session triage is when we take the list of 200 to 250 sessions and whittle it down to the 100 or so that we can accomodate at the conference. I'm delighted to announce that we approved exactly 100 sessions for the conference and about 40 hands on labs which means whether you're building applications, building devices, responsible for rolling out and managing devices or a decision maker, you'll have plenty to keep you busy during the conference.

You'll be able to see the session titles when the next revision of the website happens on 3/2.

James

MEDC US Update - 2/18

jamespr — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 02:48:00 GMT

Hey Folks

Our website, including registration, will be going live on 2/22 so stay tuned.

Site Visit

Last Friday (2/11) we visited The Mandalay Bay for a site visit. Site visits are about trying to visualize where everything will go, where to hold sessions, where to hold labs, where to put CommNet and those sorts of things. We also meet all the facility staff. I was witness to an awesome butting of technical heads between our tech guy and the senior network engineer ... I mean ... we _only_ wanted to have access to his main switch ;-) We also checked out the party venue which is pretty sweet. And for anyone who thinks a Friday visit to Vegas sounds like an excuse for a comapny paid for trip to Vegas, I flew in at 10pm Thursday and out again at 4pm Friday ... no time to stop and visit the casino!

The Call for Papers

Last Friday (2/11) the Call For Papers closed. I was overwhelmed by the number of responses we received, over 140 session submissions for the 100 or so sessions slots we have available. We won't be able to host all the submissions so if you made a submission, first, thank you and second we'll be going through them all really soon now ... which brings me to my next point.

Session Triage

Next Tuesday (2/22) we have our final session triage. The session triage is when we take all the suggested session titles/abstracts (internal and external) and decide which ones we'll have at the conference. Primarily we're looking for ones that we think are interesting and content that you can't find elsewhere. Secondarily we look for sessions that will interest a lot of people. Once we complete the triage we'll be able to publish the list of sessions soon afterwards so you'll get a chance to see what the sessions will be at the conference.

Keynote Demos

Next week we have our first keynote demos meeting. That's where we start to brainstorm the ideas for the 3, 4 or 5 cool demos that we want to share through the keynote. Last year we saw Ori build his blog client in under ten minutes. Wonder what we'll come up with this year?

James

What's new with MEDC this week?

jamespr — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:59:00 GMT

We're working hard on getting the MEDC website and registration up and running. We expect them to go live around the 22nd February at about T-12 weeks from the event. You'll be able to sign up for the conference, register for your room within our room block as well as indicate interest in the Sumobot competition. If you've got any questions in the mean time you can ask them via my blog.

Getting a website and registration site up sounds easy, right? It's time consuming, I spent yesterday afternoon running through the registration process with every single conceivable registration code (simulating the experience of every type of attendee) reviewing every aspect of the site. You can rest assured that when you register whether you're a regular attendee, Microsoft speaker, working the booth for an exhibitor, a member of the press or any one of the other types of attendee that at the very least, I will have run through the reg process already for you. Based on the review, we made some tweaks to the site to improve the flow e.g. on the survey page we grouped the compulsory questions together for ease of completion and removed a few unnecessary screens for some audience types. We also caught a few glitches in the pricing data. For example and sponsor booth attendee was being charged about 5 times what they should have been . I also noticed the room rate for THE Hotel at the Mandalay Bay was listed as $100 too expensive!

Pre-conference sessions moved forward this week. We got 2 of our 3 pre-con speakers signed up (Jim Wilson for Windows Mobile app dev and Sean Liming for Windows XP Embedded ... thanks guys). Pre-cons are a way for you to get up to speed if you aren't already familiar with Windows Mobile or Windows Embedded.

The MEDC 2005 logo came back from our creative company. It's an evolution of last year's MDC logo and reflects the incorporation of MEDC. Anyone want to guess what color we picked?

From a content perpsective, we had a meeting of all our content owners on Monday to run through the content management tool - the thing that allows you the attendee to choose which sessions you want to attend and to build your agenda. The content owners are responsible for entering their sessions, abstracts etc into the tool. This year we've taken the approach of getting an owner for each particular technology. We've got someone looking after tools, .NET Compact Framework, Windows Mobile, SQL Mobile etc etc. To you as an attendee this should be transparent as they'll be bubble up into a variety of activity based tracks e.g. Developing Client Applications, Building Windows Embedded devices etc etc

A few people have asked me about international plans. I'm working on the international dates right now but the MEDC World Tour should happen in June for the most part and will call into Europe, Malaysia, Australia, China and Korea. Our US event is the flagship and contains the greatest depth of content so if you can make the trip to the US for it it's well worth it but if time/money are tight I hope you'll visit our speaking rock stars on the World Tour!

James