I see on the
TechEd 2005 webcasts page, that they've listed Ballmer's keynote talk.
I'm checking as of 815pm PDT on Monday and it still only says "archive available 3pm EDT". Has anybody heard any furthre information about when the talk will *really* be archived?
Funny - I'm sitting in the redo of the 301/302 talk by Don Box. First thing showing on the projected screens is a command prompt, in the Office directory. The last line typed was
DEL POWERPNT.EXE
Sweet !! There will be NO PowerPoint in this talk --- code, code, code...
Whew - tired from last night's attendee party at Universal Studios. Fun time - got there early and did the rides “downstairs” before it got crowded. Lines for buses to get “home” were hellish. Cut code for work when get back: bedtime = 2 AM
Longhorn / Whidbey “Deployment and Publish“ - still can't get this to work. Went to hands on lab and tried to publish and deploy a simple app. Interested in how things work when the network is not available. Simulate this by stopping IIS on the local machine, where I'm serving up the app. Using the “publish“ option in the Whidbey build menu -- set “check for updates at application startup“. When a new version is available on the server, but IIS is down, user gets error -- can't check for updates.
Argh !! in this case, shouldn't the client just run the older version from the “cache“?
Chris Anderson had a great talk this afternoon about the application framework that's built into the Longhorn OS. He struggled through a couple demos, but nonetheless, got the points across in an almost all-demo talk.
After the marketing mandated slides, it was just code, code, code. Avalon, along with the Longhorn OS, provide some services to prevent having us all write the same plumbing code over and over. Some highlights:
- It feels a lot like the MFC application framework, where we don't write Main function any longer. The runtime and Avalon take care of WinMain, Main, etc. Call us on the Application::OnStartingUp event. (We override when necessary, to create windows, etc.)
- Window management is handled (if desired) by Avalon core. We can have the app quit when the main window is closed, when the last window is closed, or only when we call the close method.
- Services provided to do system tray notification. Very simple -- on a button click handler for example, just send a message to the tray, get the bubble notification.
- Running the EXE in a browser. Just a tweak in the XAML file, and the exe is hosted in the browser as a doc window. Navigation is done by the browser.
Well, the last day of the trade show is definitely the big one. Many of the exhibitors are eager to get rid of their SWAG, just so they don't have to take it back.
Oracle for example needed to get rid of their red PDC bean bags. I scored one in a drawing! My first win of the week!
The Longhorn group was giving away the rest of their mini RC cars -- just had to fill out some survey.
Finally, a couple bookstores were unloading all their books -- presumably to not have to carry/ship them home.
All in all - a great day of SWAG !!!
Quick report on the SWAG search (er, Trade Show):
Every PDC it's the same thing -- all these vendor booths in the trade show, showing their products, showing demos, answering questions. But it really always boils down to the same thing --- what do you have for free !!?
Thanks to ATI for the “shopping bags” -- what would we do without them? Carry all this crap around the conference?
- MSDN - metal lunch box. Only to MSDN subscribers that have their card (damn - don't have my card).
- TShirts, lots of TShirts. Got the frequent flyer one from Developmentor. Another booth (who can remember which ones are which?) had a good idea. Shirts with numbered stickers. Find the PDC nerd with a matching number, bring he/she back by the booth and win the prize. Anyone have #471 ?! :)
- Mini RC cars from Microsoft booth - they're waiting for more - tied up in the travel issues caused by fires.
- Frisbees, magnets, pens, blah, blah blah. Lots of little gadgets and thingies that my kids will end up destroying.
I rode a Segway today! Not much of a wait finally. Really weird feeling - sketchy balance the first few seconds while “it balances you”. Then just the most subtle movements in your feet (toes really) make it go forward/backward. Pretty cool.
Lakers crushed the Mavericks tonight!! Wonder how many of us PDC nerds were there?
Kral and I went to the game - Staples Center is next door to the convention center. We're such scalping newbies -- have no idea how “the system” works.
Our price point was WAY below what the scalpers were offering, so most of them would just chuckle and blow us off. Cheapskates. After Kral *ASKED THE COPS* on the street corner if scalping is legal (answer: no), we moved down the block a bit.
Finally found a dude selling for $60. Kral's printout of seating chart showed that these were about the most decent we could get on the upper deck. We were so nervous about the transaction, worried about the legitimacy of the tickets, etc. that we forgot to verify that the tickets were TOGETHER ! Whoops. The usher chuckled when we presented our *different* tickets, but just pointed us to a row where there were some empty seats. Worked out - didn't get booted from there during the game.
Lakers looked good - Malone and Payton were the show. Kobe didn't play -- showed up on the bench mid-3rd quarter. Crowd went nuts.
Had to sleep in today, so didn't catch the general session. I've been trying to focus on sessions that talk about current issues, rather than Longhorn and friends that we won't be using for a couple years.
Breakout sessions here have been packed! Most of them spill out into the hallways, sitting on the floor, watching the session from the flat panel out there.
Interop pitfalls -- turns out I'd heard about most of this already. Minimize roundtrips to unmanaged code. A couple new items:
- Default char set for unmanaged code wrappers is ANSI. Use attribute to change this to Unicode if you can, especially if you're calling Win32 APIs. Managed code is Unicode, so transition to ANSI just to call your P/Invoke, which will turn around and get converted to Unicode for the Win32 API - expensive. Sample screen saver code demo ran much faster just with Unicode attribute on the native code library.
- Class that wraps Win32 Handle that you pass to a P/Invoke function. The GC sees the CALL to the function as the last use of the handle class. As of the CALL to the function, the GC can now potentially collect the handle class -- YIKES. May not WAIT until the call RETURNS. Not sure how to get around this -- maybe reference/use the class after the call?
Funny dialogue during the Keynote code demos, regarding which editor to use to write the code. The recap:
- Don Box - emacs. “God's editor“. Multiple buffer support, flipping between files is a breeze for Don.
- Jim Alchin - vi. Yuck! Interesting to see how the chosen editor affects his coding style. For example, defer writing the closing curly braces for a function until you code the function body. I guess this makes sense, cuz it's too much work to flip into “move“ mode, just to write the ending curly, then come back up to where you want to write the code.
- Chris Anderson - Slick Edit. Haven't seen this before, probably worth checking out. Looked like some line copy/delete functions...
Personally, I'll stick with the VS IDE. I take flack for this at work, but with all my macros, add-ins, etc. this IDE does the job for me!!
Still day 1 at PDC. Don Box did a talk this afternoon on overview of Indigo. GREAT TALK. Actually most of it wasn't about Indigo per se, as it was on the state of remote object technology, web services, etc.
Hillarious “hands-on“ demo by Don towards a poor volunteer. Invading the guy's personal space from behind, then the front, showing that distributed object technology breaks when code on each side knows too much about each other.
Excellent thoughts on how server code (i.e. services) must evolve over time (new versions, bug fixes, etc) and can not break existing clients while doing so.
Indigo is all about web services: contracts and schemas. Data gets sent between end points, not classes/objects. Objects hold state AND code (functionality), and this is where it breaks.
Keynote today - Bill G -- excellent. First sightings of Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, etc. Interesting infrastructure change - we've had wireless network connectivity pretty much anywhere in the conference grounds, but not this morning...not in the big keynote hall. We're all assuming this is by design - I guess they don't want people (A) taping into their wireless network on which they're running the demos (although it's running whimpy-WEP), or (B) blogging, posting, or otherwise leaking the info about Longhorn before *they* want it out.
So there are plenty of blogs out there describing the new techs, but my quick take on the best pieces:
- Avalon - a colleague described this last week as “Flash meets GDI“. I guess that's a decent description. The runtime now supports markup (XAML) based descriptions of controls, colors, SCALING (really cool), rotation, animations, etc.
- Indigo - (still don't have my hands wrapped around what all is included in this) set of services that provide connectivity for apps. more later I guess...
We all ran to the “materials distribution center” after the keynote to get our PDC bits. (ok, well I didn't go there until after lunch) They were holding out on the Longhorn, et. al CDs and a Longhorn book by Brent Rector until after these announcements.
Hadn't heard of Virtual PC before this conference. Yes, I guess I've been living under a rock for a bit. For those 1% of you who haven't heard of it either, it's a product that allows you to run virtual isolated environments on the PC that can run a different OS, etc. So the big push here is to run Virtual PC and throw Longhorn into a virtual environment. A time-bomb copy of VPC is on the bits disc, but I haven't loaded it all yet. Plenty of people are already -- I'm letting Charles and Kral be the guinea pigs.
I know I'm late getting some posts out here...I'm amazed at all the blogs getting posted already. Are you guys still attending any of the sessions, or just blogging the whole week!? :)
Pre-conference day was pretty much re-hash of the last couple years of technology. Not a lot new, just getting everyone on a level playing field I guess.
Let's see: xml talk with Don, Tim, and Gudge. Great to hear Don again after a long absence. Didn't get a lot out of the basics of xml that they were going over. Thought they'd dive a little deeper in some of the topics.
Smart client talk with Chris Sells, and Rocky (?). Finally got an answer to the href deploy issue when you are not online. Short answer: it barfs. Only way to make it work as you would expect -- that is, the cached version of a given .NET assembly should be used if you are offline -- only works if you have told IE that you are offline by selecting Work Offline from the file menu. If IE thinks you are online, it will blow chunks when it can't hit the server.
Well, tomorrow's another day...
Jeff Julian at
Geeks With Blogs set me up with this blog to use for PDC.
Complete with RSS feed...