PDC 2005
I haven't been regular with my blog and I apologize for that. With the PDC just over, I thought now is a good time to resume my blog. I spent the week of 9/12-9/16 at the PDC in LA. Since this was the first MS conference I attended, I was amazed by the sheer scale of the event and seeing the event management running around and managing the show, it really hit me how much work goes into making these events a success.
I was primarily the track lounge owner for the Communications Track which represented these technologies – WCF, Infocard, WSE, IIS7, Networking, WWF, COM+/MSMQ. My responsibility was to manage the track lounge, starting from getting people signed up to staff the track lounge, designing the layout, and scheduling staffers in the lounge so that all technologies were represented appropriately and managing swags and give-aways at our lounge. I spent a bulk of time at the PDC in the lounge meeting customers and helping them with their questions. It was a great opportunity since not only did I get to talk to customers, I got to meet some of our digerati (like Clemens Vasters, and Aaron Skonnard) who I only knew by name before the PDC, and I also got to interact closely with lots of Microsoft people from the various technologies represented in our lounge.
Pre Conference:
The PDC officially started on Tuesday, 9/13, but there were two pre conference days on Sunday and Monday. During the pre conference, there were some scheduled talks for only a subset of the attendees who had registered for these. It was fairly light for most MS staff during the pre conference. In the lounge area, we managed to get the lounge set up and set up demos for Project Max to add some color to the plasma screens in our lounge area.
The highlight of the pre conference was the LA blackout where a water dept. worker cut the wrong light cutting electricity to most of LA, including the convention center. It took about 30 minutes for power to be restored!
Day 1:
Tuesday 9/13 was pretty crazy. Over 8000 attendees flocked to the keynote by Bill Gates where he talked about how far we’ve come and the innovations Microsoft is making in the coming years. He announced Windows Vista and Office 12, and their availability next year. Chris Capossela gave an end-user run down of Windows Vista and Office 12. Things that made customers jump were the context based QuickSearch integration which utilizes MSN desktop search and will let you find programs if you are in the start menu, or will let you find documents based on content or name if you are in document explorer. Another cool demo was the SideShow, which is available in newer laptops where you can see sidebar type of information like mail, calendar, flight status etc on the face of the laptop without booting it up! The Office 12 demos showcased the new UI, making more things discoverable, integration with sharepoint and RSS. The IE7 support for Anti-Phising was also pretty cool.
After Bill, JimAll talked more in detail about Windows Vista. Jim started by giving some demos of some interesting plumbing bits. One thing that was especially cool was Super Fetch. Super Fetch is a preloaded memory cache of things you'll likely need, but unlike typical hard drive caches, it basis it's decisions on analyzing your system usage behavior over days, weeks, months to determine what an idle machine should be preloading. The second part of his demo tied in very nicely where he showed that any USB Memory Stick could be plugged into a Windows Vista machine and it would automatically start using it for expanded virtual RAM which is pretty cool for laptop users! After that, Anders and Don came out to announce the LINQ project in a big way. Linq provides a query engine on top of XML, Object and Relational data stores using a common query language reminiscent of SQL. Next Don and Chris did some on the fly Indigo coding, and they also created a simple Avalon application. Scott Guthrie came out to show off the Atlas product which is a set of cross-browser javascripts and server-side ASP.NET controls to make Ajax style programming easy. Our very own Steve Maine wrote a POX binding that was also showcased at the keynote. The keynote ended late and I couldn’t see the rest of it, but they also showed Project Max which was another new announcement at the PDC. One pretty funny incident during JimAll’s keynote was when he announced that a windows mobile device will available to PDC customers for a special low price 149$ (normally 1000$), which caused a whole bunch of people to walk out in the middle of the keynote! The device was sold out later that day!
The lounge was not very busy on Day 1 during the morning but picked up later that day and was fairly busy through the rest of the conference.
Day 2:
I missed the keynote on Day 2, but WWF was announced in a big way. All the WWF staffers in our lounge dressed in bright orange, which also conflicted with the Avalon attire, and made their presence felt by giving away free WWF books.
I was also able to attend one talk that day by Don, where he talked about Applications and Communications Roadmap. Don’s talk was in the form of a Haiku where he showed some XLINQ and WCF code. Mike Vernal was his code monkey for the most of his talk where they extended the XLINQ program from the keynote and showcased Indigo concepts and created contracts and services, later Doug Walter came up to show how to integrate security and showed Infocards too. The talk also showed Xoml, a markup language used to create workflows and Dharma Shukla from WWF came and wrote some code showing how to spin up WWF activities and define a workflow to run in a sequence/parallel steps. Don’s talk was in a huge room and there was still overflow!
Back in the lounge, I got some questions around HTTP and streaming; other general Indigo questions like availability on downlevel platforms and time frames! People want our bits and they want them soon. I also got quite a few questions about what technologies they should use today to ensure they can interop with Indigo when it ships. I also talked to Don in the lounge about using WWF to write a test automation infrastructure with all the sequencing and ordering that it allows and dependencies it lets you create. This is surely something I will be exploring for Indigo V2.
Day 2 was also the PDC Universal Studio party and it was quite fun. The Universal Studio was open only to PDC attendees with lots of food and short queues for the various rides. I was amazed at the way things were organized right from shuttle buses to everything else. Customers were very excited and were having lots of fun!
Day 3:
I attended two talks on Day 3; one by Kenny and Yasser on extensibility. They demonstrated datagram, sessions and request reply by throwing and catching a bunch of red and blue colored balls which I thought was pretty nice. Kenny’s demo was a custom TCP channel which is interoperable with ASMX; he basically removed the Framing we use in Indigo and created a custom encoder. Yasser showed a chunking channel which took a big message and sent it out in smaller chunks and dechunked it at the other end.
I also managed to catch the Doug Purdy talk that showed web services for XML Programmers. The talk was great and showed the various message overloads, when to use what, and ended with a demo of POX.
I managed to also check out the Pavillion for partner products. I saw a pretty cool product for UI test automation from AutomatedQA. I also met some folks from Neudesic which is where David Pallman now works. The DSG booth in the product pavilion was also pretty busy and gave out a lot of Indigo tshirts and DVDs.
Day 3 was also Ask the Experts. I was an expert at the Hosting and IIS integration table where I met a few customers. The most common question was guidance around when to use what kind of hosting for their web services. I got this question a few times, both at Ask the Experts and in the lounge. One was also interested in understanding how we hook up to IIS7 and details about our protocol handlers. Some also came to the table just asking for Indigo questions in general. I also managed to talk to James McColl who is a PM on XES and is driving the spec process on some ideas for things test looks for in PM specs :) Hopefully that will help us in future milestones.
Day 4:
I attended Steve Maine’s talk on Hosting Services. A bunch of attendees were not there on Friday, consequently the talk was not very heavily attended. It was great – Steve talked about the exact questions I got from customers, how to choose the hosting model for services. His demo was also pretty cool – he showed how to hook up to IIS7 and create your own protocol handler.
Back in the lounge, customers were continuously stopping by to ask their questions. One customer came and asked how much more we are going to change from now until RTM because he attended the last PDC and was surprised how much Indigo had changed J
Overall, it was a great PDC…my first, and I would love to go to more in the future. I made a lot of friends from Microsoft and had some very interesting conversations with the Workflow guys and with folks from our team. It was hectic with long days at the lounge, and just walking around the Convention Center was quite an exercise. But I absolutely loved the experience interacting with customers and people on such a large scale.
Based on my conversations, the key things customers are looking from us:
Guidance on Migration to Indigo and technologies they can use today to interoperate with Indigo tomorrow
Guidance on Choosing the hosting model for services
Key message for Platform support
Ship soon and stabilize!
