October 2003 Entries
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Jeff Julian at Geeks With Blogs set me up with this blog to use for PDC. Complete with RSS feed