Riding Herd : PDC

PDC 05 videos online (with a few issues)

jmazner — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 00:53:00 GMT

Many folks have noticed that Mike Swanson's weeks of hard work have paid off, and the full video, PPT and demo recordings of PDC 05 sessions are now online (and that the DVD sets for attendees will be on the way soon as well.) Seems like the videos are quite popular.

With great popularity comes great responsibility, though...or something like that. We know of two issues so far.

First, performance has slowed considerably. Our vendor knows about the issue and they are trying to add bandwidth now.

Second, we've heard that the site doesn't work if you're not using IE. We're going to look into that also. The history of the the HTML up there is that it started life as an .hta application that we use as the auto-run experience. I don't think anyone on the content planning team ever specifically asked in what browsers the site would be tested, but we're catching up now ;) I'm waiting to hear back from the vendor to figure out what quick fixes, if any, we can make.

Another mini-guide update

jmazner — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 07:07:00 GMT

We heard from some attendees that they were having a hard time choosing between DAT209 (WinFS Future Directions: An Overview) and TLN306 (The .NET Language Integreate Query Framework: An Overview) in the Wednesday 1:45pm timeslot. To make it a little easier on folks, we scheduled a repeat of DAT209 for 5:15PM on Thursday. Now those who wanted to catch both sessions have a way to make it work.

How to build a great Windows Vista app

jmazner — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 21:59:00 GMT

One of the goodies that PDC attendees will find in their swag bag is a poster called "Lighting up on Windows Vista". It lists the top 10 things developers can do to build apps that will run like a dream on our new OS release.

We've now posted a short whitepaper that adds some technical background and documenation to that poster. If you're looking for a good quick answer to the question "is there anything new or interesting in Windows Vista?", this is a pretty good place to start getting answers. We have lots of PDC sessions that drill deeper into these technologies as well, and as the week progresses we will be making the slides from those talks available.

tag: PDC05

PDC mini-guide updates

jmazner — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 06:38:00 GMT

The PDC content team is on site in LA! It's been an intense last month getting ready for the event, which explains the absence of any interesting blog posts from me. If I have some time in the next few days before the show starts, I will try to write up more of what we've been up to. In the meantime, however, I wanted to send along a heads up on some recent changes to our session list.

We have been constantly fine tuning the session list and room assignments over the past month, in large part based on attendee data from the personal calendar tool. The most current session list is always available on CommNet, and changes are pushed via our RSS feed. As it turns out, though, the mini-guide, the pocket-sized list of all session times and room assignments that attendees receive at check-in, had to go to print in August. We tried really hard to avoid making changes after the print date, since we know many attendees rely on the mini-guide as their PDC bible. But when the personal calendar data showed us that our room size was really far off base, we decided it was more important to have the right size room than to have the mini-guide be 100% accurate.

So, for your reference, here is the list of sessions which have changed since the mini-guide was printed. We'll provide a printed copy of this as well at the registration desk.

COML02: Tips & Tricks: System.NET
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated room:
Room change	9/13/05, 11:45AM, 404AB	9/13/05, 11:45AM, 403AB

COM311: Developing P2P Applications Using Windows Vista and the Windows Communication Foundation (“Indigo”) PeerChannel
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated room:
Room change	9/13/05, 2:45PM 409AB	9/13/05, 2:45PM, 403AB

FUN403: .NET Compact Framework 2.0: Optimizing for Performance
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated room:
Room change	9/13/05, 2:45PM 403AB	9/13/05, 2:45PM, 409AB

PRS327: Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"): Optimizing Applications for Performance
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated room:
Room change	9/15/05, 5:15PM 411	9/15/05, 5:15PM 408AB

FUN319: Windows Vista: Developing Power-Aware Applications
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated room:
Room change	9/15/05, 5:15PM 408AB	9/15/05, 5:15PM 411

DAT321: XML Tools: Future Directions for Leveraging Advanced XML Tools and Building Custom XML Solutions
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Repeat added:
Repeat added	9/15/05, 3:45PM, 409AB	9/13/05, 1:00PM, 501ABC<

DAT323: Using the .NET Language Integrated Query Framework with Relational Data
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Repeat added:
Repeat added	9/16/05, 8:30AM, 408AB	9/15/05, 2:15PM, Hall F

PRS321: Windows Forms: Integrating Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon")
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Repeat added:
Repeat added	9/15/05, 11:30AM, 404AB	9/16/05, 10:30AM, 501ABC

OFF405: Windows SharePoint Services: Using ASP.NET 2.0 Technology to Extend Pages, Sites, and Server Farms
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Repeat added:
Repeat added	9/14/05, 11:00AM, 409AB	9/15/05, 2:15PM, 518

DATL07: Tips & Tricks: 10 Tips for Extending Your System to Windows Mobile Devices
Change type:	Mini Guide Says:	Actual Scheduled Time Is:
Mini Guide Error	9/14/05, 12:30PM, 403AB	9/16/05, 12:00PM, 402AB

TLNL11: Case Study: Tuning MSN Performance Using Load Testing Tools
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated schedule:
Cancellation	9/16/05, 12:00PM, 408AB	cancelled

FUN200: Windows Vista: Taking Advantage of Windows Vista in Your Application
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated schedule:
Time change	9/13/05, 1:00PM, Hall EF	This content will be delivered as part of Jim Allchin’s keynote on 9/13 (as explained here)

PRS223: Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software: 2005 Edition
Change type:	Originally scheduled:	Updated schedule:
Time Change	9/15/05, 2:15PM Hall F	9/13/05, 1:00PM Hall EF

In addition, there are a few sessions we planned a while back, but did not put onto CommNet for various reasons. We're starting to upload those sessions now. The first two (which you will find in your mini-guide, but are now also available on CommNet) are

PRSL02: Case Study: How Hotmail Used Atlas and ASP.NET to Build a Great User Experience

PRSL04: MSN: Extending Start.com Using Startlets

tag: PDC05

PDC session list now in XLS and RSS formats

jmazner — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 02:47:00 GMT

Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference...by popular request, the current list of PDC sessions is now available as an Excel spreadsheet, or as RSS^H^H^H Web Feeds ;). Any changes we make to session titles, speakers, timeslots, etc (and I'm sure there will be some) will be auotmatically reflected in these links.

What makes for a good PDC session?

jmazner — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:36:00 GMT

The closer the PDC track team comes to locking down our session list, the more we hear from internal Microsoft platform folks who wonder why their sessions didn't make the cut (or why out of the 10 sessions they proposed, only 1 got approved). When the track team first started their triages a few months back, they asked me for some guidance they could use to prioritize. I just stumbled across the mail I sent them, and I thought it might be interesting to paste it here verbatim (or almost verbatim -- any edits are in [brackets]). If you're wondering what kind of session content you can expect to see at PDC this year, read on...

----

The primary objective of any PDC breakout session must be to help our customers (senior developers and architects) make strategic decisions about how and when they commit to our platform over the next 2+ years. We want attendees to leave the conference with a clear understanding of the new scenarios we think our platform enables, and confidence that the platform is robust and complete enough to meet their needs. We also want them to be genuinely excited by our vision, to share in our enthusiasm for our work, and to evangelize our technologies to their colleagues back home.

I can envision several different kinds of breakout sessions that would meet the goals above:

Broad vision and platform roadmap, covering where we think the industry is going, what the new requirements and needs are for software, and how we plan to build a platform that meets those needs. I’d expect this kind of content mostly in keynotes and anchor sessions.
Specific technology/product roadmap, explaining how and when the functionality in a given piece of our platform will evolve over time, and how we expect it to be used at each stage along the way. This is mostly anchor and overview sessions, I think.
New technology details, reviewing the specific capabilities of new parts of our platform and how they help developers address the scenarios that we think are important. PDC is billed as our strategic, forward looking event, and this kind of content should make up the bulk of our breakouts.
Internals, architecture and robustness, content that explains to attendees how our platform works so that they can be confident it will meet their needs. In some cases, this may be directly actionable (“here’s how Avalon parses the element tree and load time, so here are three things you should avoid to keep performance snappy”), but in many cases it may be more information sharing (“here’s how Avalon uses Dx, so you can be confident that you will get the graphics performance you need in your Avalon apps”).
Best practices and better together, sharing the best information we have on key architectural insights that will help our developers actually succeed in building new scenarios using all the technologies in our platform.

Those 5 bullets make for a pretty broad umbrella, so let me scope it back down by adding one more criteria:

Content should be presented at PDC because it is the only appropriate forum – it is so advanced that it requires the person who spec’d and built the technology to present it in person to the architect who’s going to try to use it.

To me, that means the following kinds of breakout sessions are not appropriate for PDC

Training and “how-to” sessions. Our breakout sessions are not intended to be simple “here’s how to use this class, here’s how to use that class” training sessions. If your content is covered in the SDK docs, it’s not appropriate for PDC
[I removed another point here that focused on some internal politics -- I don't think it makes sense to include publicly]
Sessions on shipping technology. We generally assume that anything shipping within a few months of PDC is going to be exhaustively documented via books, whitepapers, outside training classes, etc. There will be some key 400-level sessions on internals/architecture that can only be given at PDC, and we do want to include those, but for the most part a 300-level or lower session on shipping technology doesn’t belong at PDC.
Content that was covered at TechEd. TechEd is all about training on today’s technology – it’s almost a given that a talk [presented] at TechEd is not a fit for PDC (and vice-versa).
IT pro and end-user content. Our audience is [mostly] developers, and so we focus our content towards that audience.

Another way to evaluate potential sessions is to think of what level content is being proposed. PDC is a technical conference, and we want to see at least 25% of our content at the 400-level this year. Here’s how I described levels at our first track team meeting in April:

200 level (generally anchor and overview sessions)

Focuses on broad technology overview
Emphasizes capabilities, scenarios and value
Simple code samples to make a point

300 level (generally scenario sessions)

Focuses on demonstrating how to implement a solution
Detailed code samples and architecture to show how it all fits together

400 level (generally deep technical internals sessions)

Focuses on internals, the how and why
Emphasizes internal architectural considerations and decisions and how they impact real-world usage
Code samples that illustrate the behavior of the component

PDC track owners are blogging...

jmazner — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 01:18:00 GMT

I've noticed that a couple of the track owners on our virtual content team have started blogging about PDC.

Mike Fitzmaurice is one of the track owners for our Office 12 and Sharepoint content. He talked a bit about why he's excited to have a signifcant Office and Sharepoint presence at PDC this year. I'm also psyched to have a significant Office presence at PDC this year. Take a look at the preview session titles. In addition to some of the obvious sessions, like "Outlook Integration: Building Messaging and Collaboration Solutions with New "Outlook 12" Extensibility", I think people will be pleasantly surprised by the amount of focus the Office team is bringing towards enabling developers to really leverage O12 as the platform for their own custom solutions. Note "Advancements in Document, Content, and Data Storage in Windows SharePoint Services "v3" Platform" and "Developing an End-to-End Document Workflow Solution Using Office Client and Server Technologies ", for example

Brad Abrams is working on the Tools and Languages track, and since we posted the preview of PDC session titles, he's added a bit of commentary on some of his favorites. I agree with Brad that our talks on language innovations are going to be very interesting. Paul Vick thinks the VB content he's pulling together for PDC wil "blow your socks off".

The Data and Systems track has a great team behind it, with Tom Rizzo (whose blog seems to be down, but I found the link and text from Niels,) Euan Garden and Matt Nunn as the driving forces. These guys have provided some great feedback in our weekly track meetings, despite having a lot of work to do around TechEd. Maybe now that they are past that event, we'll see more PDC blogging from them...

Our next track meeting, on Wednesday, will be the first time we look at a complete session, with best effort session titles from each of the tracks. We'll review each session as a group to make sure we all agree it's PDC calibre and fits our goals for the event, which means we'll probably find a few to cut or combine together, and make room for additional content that the track owners think we ought to cover. Then right after that meeting, I have to scramble over to a review with execs to show what progress we've made, and demonstrate that our PDC content is on track to be excatly the kind of strategic platform roadmap that we promised it would be back in March.

By the end of the month, we should have a high degree of confidence in our session list and speakers, and so I hope that starting in July you'll some of the speakers start to blog as they think through how to best create their presentations and demos (and hands on labs too!).

PDC registration now open

jmazner — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 21:14:00 GMT

I have a long list of backlogged things to post about...but for now, I just want to quickly note that registration is open! We also posted 50+ session titles -- these aren't the final titles, but they give a pretty good flavor for the kinds of things we'll be covering. You'll see some info about IE in there, and lots about Longhorn. There will be even more details coming over the next two months as we finalize the session list and speakers.

PDC registration opens June 7th

jmazner — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 01:04:00 GMT

I saw it on a banner ad on microsoft.com, so it must be true! PDC reg opens June 7...

PDC updates

jmazner — Tue, 10 May 2005 08:45:00 GMT

It’s been a while since I last posted about PDC content planning. Thing suddenly got very busy in the last month, as we got ready to move into the session development phase.

One of the things that makes PDC unique among Microsoft conferences is how we decide what technologies to cover, and then come up with our list of breakout sessions. PDC exists to highlight our future platform roadmap, to indicate where Microsoft sees the biggest opportunities and how our platform technologies will enable developers to capitalize on them. The implication for me, as Content Owner for the event, is that I can’t just ask every product team for a list of their new APIs and assign a session to each one. I’m responsible for ensuring that our session lists reflects the platform strategy being set by senior leaders around the company, and the best way to do that is, well, to spend a lot of time talking with senior leaders around the company. So it’s been a little busy lately ;)

In March, I started pulling together a rough list of our strategic investments in platform technologies. Understanding what we’re building and why is a key responsibility of a technical evangelist, so between my own knowledge and that of the rest of the evangelism team, I had a good head start. The end result was a catalog of areas of investment, and the rough picture of how they work together to enable new features and scenarios in your applications. From that list, the core planning team (myself, Steve and Jeff in particular) tried to distill the top two or three things that we’d want to emphasize as our main messages for PDC ’05. I also started trying to bucket the technologies into a set of 5 or 6 tracks, where each track would contain sessions focused on a similar set of scenarios.

Once our draft was in place, it was time to start circulating among the strategy leaders at the company for feedback. We spent a lot of time up front with Vic and Charles Fitzgerald, and then moved on to the product team leaders building Visual Studio 2005, WinFX, Office and Windows. We took feedback from each review and quickly integrated that into our plan. There was at least one VP who heard us present multiple times in the course of just a few days, and he noted that our plan got a bit better each time he heard from us ;) We also had a chance to get feedback from Jim Allchin, Group Vice President for Platforms, to be sure that we were accurately reflecting his vision for the work his organization is doing. That work took us through April, and by the end of it all we understood, from a high level, what we wanted to emphasize at PDC.

So how do we get from a high level vision and a catalog of technologies to a list of 150+ breakout sessions? With a lot of help, and a lot of effort. The help consists of senior leaders from around the company agreeing to oversee a particular PDC track. The effort consists of meeting once a week for a 4 hour work session, followed up by lots of homework in between meetings. April 29^th was our first track meeting, we met again on May 4, and our third meeting will be next Wednesday.

We’ve got a really amazing team of track leaders. Based on our experience with PDC 03, we decided it made sense to have a team of 3 people overseeing each track. The lead role has been dubbed Advisor. The Advisor is someone senior enough to understand our platform strategy company wide, and who understands what part of the platform story their track needs to tell. Because they’re so senior, it’s hard to get a lot of their time – we only ask Advisors to attend the first hour of our weekly meetings. I don’t want to name names, but our Advisors include a VP, a Distinguished Engineer and some very senior Group Program Managers. You can learn a lot by spending an hour a week with these folks.

Our track Owners bear the responsibility of turning the Advisor’s strategy into a plan – going from the big vision to an actual list of sessions, labs, ask the expert sessions, etc. Some of the Owners are bloggers, keep an eye out and see if they post any good war stories from our meetings thus far ;) The Owners are in turn assisted by Drivers, mostly Program Managers who can help do all the work of assembling a high quality list of session titles, abstracts, and more.

We’re off to an energetic start, I would say. We spent the first two meetings talking about our philosophy for PDC, what type of content we want to offer, how much we should focus on “here and now” technologies vs. “next year” technologies vs. “future vision” technologies. Once I’m sure we actually have a consensus, I might publish some of the guidelines we’ve worked out thus far. We’ll see the first fruits of labor this Wed, when the track teams have to present their initial list of possible sessions. For this first pass, I’ve asked the teams to cast a wide net for technologies that might make sense in their tracks, and come up with a list of sessions that’s two to three times larger than we know can be accommodated. We’ll review those lists as a group to start identify the top sessions that will really have the most impact for the MS development community.

In addition to the breakout session development process, we’ve also had folks working on other key pieces of the PDC puzzle. The bits disc, for example, is moving along. That’s what we call the DVD set we hand out to attendees at the start of the conference, with a collection of the latest and greatest builds of technologies that we talk about at PDC. Other team members are working on our pre-conference training session, and the plans for our hands on labs (check out what TechEd is doing for labs to get a taste of the work here.)

It’s early days still for PDC, but by the end of May we will really be rolling and should be well on our way to a final session list. Keep an eye out on the main site for our first update, which should be coming along soon, hopefully!

Survey results coming in

jmazner — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:21:00 GMT

Thanks to the 96 of you who took the time to complete the survey. I'm just getting started looking through the results, here are some of things I've noted so far:

You spend most of your time on the job doing dev/implementation work, but architecture is a close second.
You mostly only go to one conference a year.
About 20% of you went to both PDC 2003 and one of the recent TechEds (03 or 04).
Of the various reasons you attend PDC, the two most important are "to understand what the big new pieces of platform technology provide, so that I understand what new end-user capabilities I can add to my app and how to architect my app to support them" and "to talk with my peers, architects and developers at MS and other companies, to understand how they’re approaching technology and make sure I’m not missing the next big thing."
You are pretty evenly split between focusing on Web-based interface and Windows client interfaces.
The vast majority of you plan to use C# for new projects going forward
You particularly enjoyed listening to, and speaking with, folks from Indigo, ASP.NET and the CLR team
You remember the keynotes fondly, particularly Bill, Jim Allchin (he coded in VI), and Rick Rashid (he demo'd a physics simulator on the TabletPC)
You thought it was too crowded and the wireless sucked (no surprise there ;)
More technical content would be appreciated, particularly around shipping technology and unmanaged code. PDC 2003 was a little too forward looking.
Do more to help us network – better social spaces, better tools for finding people of like interests, etc.

There is tons of good feedback in there which I will share with the planning team. We are listening!

Survey: what value have you gotten out of PDC?

jmazner — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 03:12:00 GMT

12 devs in a focus group may not be able to represent the entire dev community, but surely my 10's of readers do, right? Well, maybe not, but still I'd like to know more about what value you get out of dev conferences. I created a short survey at http://host.ultimatesurvey.com/Microsoft/Surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?surveyid=1039, for those who are willing to share their opinions with me. There also a few questions up there about programming languages in use, job roles, etc, which will help me as we go through the content creation process. You don't want to know how many crazy debates we get into about which talks should highlight C# vs. C++ vs. VB.NET in their demo code ;)

Why do developers go to conferences?

jmazner — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 03:10:00 GMT

My post last week in response to Scott generated some good discussion about the value of developer conferences in general. It certainly got me pondering more about how we ought to think of the value of PDC. As luck would have it, our creative agency for PDC decided to hold a couple focus groups on Tuesday, specifically around understanding developer motivation for attending conferences. So I got to sit on the dark side of a two-way mirror and listen to a dozen devs talking about what matters to them. While there was no effort made to assemble a representative group, and you can’t assume that 12 people speak for the whole of the dev community, it was a really interesting exercise.

One of the most interesting things, from my perspective, was that the responses were all pretty consistent. We had a decent mix of folks, with different backgrounds and jobs, but everyone seemed to agree with one another. When the moderator asked our two focus groups why they go to conferences, we heard a pretty similar set of answers:

Networking, a chance to connect with other geeks who are as passionate about coding as I am. One guy said he’s had a lot of experiences where he just starts chatting with the person next to him, and they end up sharing tips and tricks, and even continuing to email questions/answers back and forth after the conference.
Learning, getting to spend time focusing on new things. It’s too hard in your day to day job to really set aside time to focus on learning new stuff. Plus, a good presenter can teach you things in one hour that might take you a weekend to learn on your own just reading a book.
Labs, having hands on access to products and dev environments that you don’t have back at the office.
Inspiration, seeing what other people are doing with software.
See the warts, talk directly with the developers building and using the technology to get their honest assessment of not just strengths, but also weaknesses, unblemished by the touch of PR and marketing.

The groups also talked about what makes for a good conference. Again, there was clear consensus:

Food. Lots of mention of this. Folks want good food to keep them fueled throughout the conference. Only one person specifically mentioned also wanting to have lots of good parties, which either means we had mostly a very serious group of devs in the room, or nobody was willing to admit that it’s all about the parties ;)
Technical, not marketing, content. I don’t want to pay for the privilege of being marketed to, the content better be intellectually stimulating
Great presenters, people who are engaging and know how to deliver a talk.
Real world focus. Don’t just talk about some fantasy world 2 years in the future where a bunch of new stuff has shipped and is somehow magically running on every desktop, be sure to include some content on what I can do today, in a real world homogenous environment.

I enjoyed hearing the groups talk, and a great deal of interesting and funny things came up over the 4 hours I was watching. I think my favorite was the one guy who said he had an epiphany listening to Brockshmidt explain COM at the ’93 PDC, but walked out on BillG’s keynote at the ’97 PDC because he thought it was totally boring.

Lazycoder doesn't think PDC is worth the cost

jmazner — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 05:10:00 GMT

Lazycoder: Microsoft Tech Ed and PDC not worth the time or money

What do you really miss by not going to a PDC?

You miss a chance to learn about upcoming MS technology directly from the architects and developers who are building it, and you miss a chance to interact with 5000+ other professionals who share your passion for coding. Yes, we do go out of our way to make as much information as possible publicly available after the conference, but there’s no substitute for being in the room to participate in a panel discussion like this one. You won’t find any other conferences where you can ask a question about CLR internals and have it answered by Anders, Chris, Jim and the rest. Yeah, the panel transcript was blogged, but what wasn’t blogged was the 1:1 interactions with between the Microsoft engineers and the 40 attendees who crowded around the stage after the panel was done. Nor did anyone blog the conversations that took place among the thousands of attendees as they interacted during sessions, labs, meals, etc.

If you don’t think you’re the type of person who’d take advantage of being surrounded by thousands of the sharpest Windows developers on the planet, then you are right, PDC is probably not the best use of your time. Just like if you’re the type of student who learns everything you need by reading the textbook, paying for university is probably not the best use of your money ;)

Notice how the people at blogs.msdn.com will hype Tech Ed and PDC but you hardly hear a word about non-MS sponsored events, like VS Live, over there. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think it’s disingenuous.

Lazycoder's blog tagline is "I don’t know, therefore I Google." But I guess he doesn't Google too often, because when I ask Google to search blogs.msdn.com for references to conferences like BorCon and VSLive, I see plenty of results. Not as many as for Microsoft sponsored events, but that’s only natural. People blog about what they’re working on. A high percentage of Microsoft people are involved in PDC and TechEd, so it’s natural blogging material. A much smaller percentage attend other conferences, so you get lower traffic.

Getting decent wireless connectivity at PDC

jmazner — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 22:56:00 GMT

I've seen several comments about the issues with WLAN accessibility at PDC '03. I am delighted to say that there is someone thinking hard about how to improve the situation for PDC ’05, and even more delighted still to say that it isn’t me.

I missed the fact that Jeff Sandquist announced back in December that he’s on point for community at PDC this year. Among the things on his plate is what kind of PDC intranet experience we want to provide – which means that he’s also thinking about how attendees will actually get access to the intranet ;)

Getting consistent wireless access for the conference is a significant challenge. How do you build an infrastructure to support thousands of people walking out of the keynote, opening up their laptops, and expecting to be instantly online? I’ll leave it to Jeff to decide if he wants to talk about what the issues were last time, and how we hope to improve on them this time. But I can assure you that Microsoft employees felt the pain of the WLAN in 2003 just as much as our attendees did. I expect to be roaming around a lot on site this year, making sure that all the breakout sessions, labs, etc, are running smoothly, so I have a strong interest in making sure that wireless is consistently available this year. Go Jeff!