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!!