Tuesday, September 20, 2005
PDC Followup
There was so much I wanted to blog about while at the PDC, but with the problems I had getting Blogger to post to my site, I didn’t do it. For some strange reason, things are working fine now. So, here’s some of the stuff I missed….
There were several former Fox people there: Markus Egger, Ellen Whitney, Rod Paddock, Kevin McNeish, Jim Duffy, Maurice de Beijer…and of course yag and Ken.
Tuesday night was the “Influencer’s Party” at the posh White Lotus in Hollywood. It featured acrobats hanging from the ceiling, a chocolate fountain (yummy), lots of good food, and a Microsoft ice sculpture for serving up “Microsoft-tinis” and “PDC-tinis”. Put your glass inside the ice sculpture and the alcohol was poured into the top, ran through a tube embedded in the ice, and filled your glass. I’ll have pictures up once I can find my camera cable.
Wednesday was an MVP lunch with Developer Division Vice-Presidents Soma and Craig Symonds. We had a Q&A session with them…but it was just great to meet them.
The PDC party was at Universal Studios. I was psyched to go as I’ve never been there. However, I attended an ISV session and got out later than I expected. The lines waiting for buses were quite long and I was VERY tired…so I decided to skip it. LA isn’t that far from here (about 10 hours by car) so I could get there sometime in the future.
Wednesday morning, Eric Rudder (another former Fox guy) announced the Expression suite of products. These look very, very interesting. There are some way cool things that you can do with them. I not a graphics guy, but there are some development uses for the products.
Steven Sinofsky showed some of the Sharepoint technologies. I bailed out as I doubt I’ll ever use Sharepoint…and Sinofsky is not the best of presenters. His voice is quite nasal and it tends to annoy after a short time.
Thursday’s keynote was Bob Muglia. He announced some new things with Windows Server, including improvements in IIS 7 and Windows Longhorn Server. Two quotes worth noting, “Windows server will move very, very aggressively to 64 bit” and “I really think of 32 bit as legacy”. I’m already on record saying that Windows Vista will be the last 32 bit Operating System from Microsoft.
I did attend some sessions:
- Raymond Chen, “Five Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know”. Raymond is the king of the Win32 API. What a great presenter! Very funny…and he presents complicated topics in a way that non-C++ people can understand. I hope to hear him again.
- “Building Apps that Look Great in Vista” This was all about the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). I’m really impressed by what can be done with WPF, but still unsure how difficult it is to do these very cool things. I’m hoping to play some more with it in the next few months.
- Ken Levy on the new XML editors in Visual Studio 2005. If you have to do anything with XML, these tools will help you out.
- “Using Data in WPF Apps” showed how you build a UI using XAML and then link data to that. Very useful stuff as I start playing with WPF.
- “LINQ with Relational Data”. The presenter was Luca Bolognese…and he was quite humorous. This was basically a DLINQ session…and I could definitely see the Fox influence in LINQ and chuckled when he started showing off how to call Stored Procedures, then said this stuff is called “SQL Pass Through”.
- “What We Learned Building a WPF Designer Tool in WinFx”. One of the products in the Express suite is built using WPF. This was somewhat of a best practices session. The presenter, John Gossman, discussed problems they ran into while trying to learn WinFx and create a real product. This is a session I’ll review again.
- “WPF Under the Hood”. This was one of the last sessions of the conference. Initially I was going to skip it, thinking that I needed to understand the outside before going in deep. However, I was not disappointed. Chris Anderson talked about the major areas inside WPF and how it works. Really fascinating stuff.
As you might have guessed, there was LOTS of food, with Microsoft feeding us every meal and all the snacks and soda we could eat and drink. All the Microsoft people we really great and approachable. The dozens of vendors hawking things were fun…I got some goodies. I got the typical stuff, an MP3 player and even won a Play Station Portable….after all… in the end, isn’t it all about the swag???
The PDC was definitely worth it. It isn’t a conference that is held every year, but one I hope to attend again.
There were several former Fox people there: Markus Egger, Ellen Whitney, Rod Paddock, Kevin McNeish, Jim Duffy, Maurice de Beijer…and of course yag and Ken.
Tuesday night was the “Influencer’s Party” at the posh White Lotus in Hollywood. It featured acrobats hanging from the ceiling, a chocolate fountain (yummy), lots of good food, and a Microsoft ice sculpture for serving up “Microsoft-tinis” and “PDC-tinis”. Put your glass inside the ice sculpture and the alcohol was poured into the top, ran through a tube embedded in the ice, and filled your glass. I’ll have pictures up once I can find my camera cable.
Wednesday was an MVP lunch with Developer Division Vice-Presidents Soma and Craig Symonds. We had a Q&A session with them…but it was just great to meet them.
The PDC party was at Universal Studios. I was psyched to go as I’ve never been there. However, I attended an ISV session and got out later than I expected. The lines waiting for buses were quite long and I was VERY tired…so I decided to skip it. LA isn’t that far from here (about 10 hours by car) so I could get there sometime in the future.
Wednesday morning, Eric Rudder (another former Fox guy) announced the Expression suite of products. These look very, very interesting. There are some way cool things that you can do with them. I not a graphics guy, but there are some development uses for the products.
Steven Sinofsky showed some of the Sharepoint technologies. I bailed out as I doubt I’ll ever use Sharepoint…and Sinofsky is not the best of presenters. His voice is quite nasal and it tends to annoy after a short time.
Thursday’s keynote was Bob Muglia. He announced some new things with Windows Server, including improvements in IIS 7 and Windows Longhorn Server. Two quotes worth noting, “Windows server will move very, very aggressively to 64 bit” and “I really think of 32 bit as legacy”. I’m already on record saying that Windows Vista will be the last 32 bit Operating System from Microsoft.
I did attend some sessions:
- Raymond Chen, “Five Things Every Win32 Developer Should Know”. Raymond is the king of the Win32 API. What a great presenter! Very funny…and he presents complicated topics in a way that non-C++ people can understand. I hope to hear him again.
- “Building Apps that Look Great in Vista” This was all about the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). I’m really impressed by what can be done with WPF, but still unsure how difficult it is to do these very cool things. I’m hoping to play some more with it in the next few months.
- Ken Levy on the new XML editors in Visual Studio 2005. If you have to do anything with XML, these tools will help you out.
- “Using Data in WPF Apps” showed how you build a UI using XAML and then link data to that. Very useful stuff as I start playing with WPF.
- “LINQ with Relational Data”. The presenter was Luca Bolognese…and he was quite humorous. This was basically a DLINQ session…and I could definitely see the Fox influence in LINQ and chuckled when he started showing off how to call Stored Procedures, then said this stuff is called “SQL Pass Through”.
- “What We Learned Building a WPF Designer Tool in WinFx”. One of the products in the Express suite is built using WPF. This was somewhat of a best practices session. The presenter, John Gossman, discussed problems they ran into while trying to learn WinFx and create a real product. This is a session I’ll review again.
- “WPF Under the Hood”. This was one of the last sessions of the conference. Initially I was going to skip it, thinking that I needed to understand the outside before going in deep. However, I was not disappointed. Chris Anderson talked about the major areas inside WPF and how it works. Really fascinating stuff.
As you might have guessed, there was LOTS of food, with Microsoft feeding us every meal and all the snacks and soda we could eat and drink. All the Microsoft people we really great and approachable. The dozens of vendors hawking things were fun…I got some goodies. I got the typical stuff, an MP3 player and even won a Play Station Portable….after all… in the end, isn’t it all about the swag???
The PDC was definitely worth it. It isn’t a conference that is held every year, but one I hope to attend again.
// posted by Craig Berntson @ 9:55:00 AM 
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