That was a busy week. 10+ hours of flying to get home with a 8 hours time difference. Now I can finally get to play with the great new toys. Have installed LINQ but having problems. The libraries are there, but VS and the compilers do not seem to have been updated.. Arggg.. Well, time to hit the newsgroups/forums and see if there's a way of fixing without re-building computer :)

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Another interesting day. Have installed Acrylic, and now need to start playing with it. Picked up the VS2005-RC1 (which seems to have a version of SQL server on it, which is good since I use both), which is going onto my laptop this weekend. Also got to log on, to register for beta of Office 12 once it comes out. Finally had some time to have a good walk arround the sponsers, and have a chat with some of the Microsoft people about a couple of issues. The main being one which I found recently, but...

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Another long day, not all good. First the bad, the bus arrangement to go to the party didn't seem to be working that well. Apartently it was made worse by some sort of accident, but there seemed to be a certain lack of co-ordination. The party was fun enough, I got to go on more rides than last time I went to a Universal studios, but there were not enough places to get drinks. The good news, is LINQ, something very impressive. I attended two sessions on it today (both by Anders). This I got to install,...

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A number of things were talked about; The new Expression suite, particularly 'Acrylic'. I know a graphic artist who wants to have look. Personnally the Windows Work Flow (WWF mmm) and Office 12 were the main points of interest. They could both be very useful. The workflow diagrams reminded me of the BizTalk ones. Things to note; (mostly from yesterday) when you print a web page, you can get it to print correctly on 1 page; RSS support within Outlook (what took them so long :) One of things I'm going...

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Well, that was a long day yesterday. Ended on a interesting session about Win forms 2.0, which was rather crowded (I gather they are going to repeat it). It was nice to see a overview like that. Then went to PDC undergroup meeting/party, which was fun. Interesting format; each speaker had a fixed (small) amount of time to talk about a topic. Very focused. Then back to convention center for 'Birds of a Feather'. I think the birds of a feather format is not quite right, but can't quite come up with...

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Keynote overran, same as in TechEd 2005 Orlando. Office 12 was very interesting, and I want it :). It was interesting to see the starting of merging of handling of relational (databases) and non-relational data (code). Could be very useful. The announcement re: the cheap mobile devices was a bit irritating, since they had sold out within 10 minutes of keynote finishing (i.e. lots of people left early). Went to a presentation on building a compiler in 1 hour. Ok, so quite a bit of the code was prepared...

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Well, that was the second day. Bit depressing, it's already over :). It does make me wish that there was a way of getting hold of more information regarding the other pre-conf's, since there was at least one other session I wish I could also have attended (Extensibility of Visual Studio), but that's life. The session on reusable class library was interesting, and will be usefull once I get home, even if's just to explain to people why my class libraries are written as they are. It was a interesting...

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Was not sure how well attended this would be (seemed a bit esotoric), but we are in a big room, and they are scanning people on entrance. Not sure if that's to check if you get the free book, or not. Looking at the slide deck, it looks interesting, as does the book "Framework Design Guidelines. Something else to fly back with :) It's funny, but building reusable class libraries is what I seem to have been doing since .NET came out (What that says about their reusability I'm not sure). Mostly they...

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Well, that was interesting. It seems MS has really put a lot of thought into some of the fundamentals, such as interop. They've also added something to System.Exception, namely a Data property (IDictionary), to allow the caster to store additional information. I guess it's the same with anything, it can be misused. previously I've had to explain to work colleages why you should NOT use exceptions to pass messages around. This is going to tempt them even more :). It's nice they've at last got a more...

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Well, it's started good. I decided to attend a pre-conference session on what's new in C# and .NET framework 2.0 The one thing I was worried about, was how much I had seen previously of the topic, and I was right in general. But there is quite a bit I had not seen before, or even thought of. And the presenter has a good way of putting it across. I do wish that the pre-conference sessions were recorded, it could be rather useful. For example; In the .Net 2.0, you can write Iterators. Very cool. But...

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Well, have finally arrived at Los Angeles, and it seems rather spread out. Hotel room seems ok. Looking forwards to tomorrow Now that I away from work, I might finally have time to investigate some of the thigns on my outstanding list. This includes a weird issue with VS2003, where having the right lines in the code (one of which is a verrry long const string), causes VS to close down on compile. Will have to post a example. And than I want to recheck a 2003 project which was upgraded to VS2005,...

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