At the PDC, whenever a session is too full, they have overflow rooms where they beam the presentation and a video of the speaker. This is a wonderful idea and it's very useful for people who would miss their favorite session otherwise. It's almost as good as being there since most of the sessions you sit far back and see screens of the speaker anyway.

Even cooler, though, is that some creative folks began camping the overflow rooms. The idea being that the most interesting sessions (with some 'sleepers') will overflow and with only a few footsteps you can view the best sessions.

Personally, I love it because I actually stand outside the overflow rooms and peer/listen through the doors-- bouncing from session to session. I'm much more interested in getting breadth over the cool tidbits than getting a deep pull into any one thing (probably the story of my life). When you sit in a session, you're a captive audience and you watch every second of people navigating their IDEs/demos/technical probs/etc.

Just a moment ago I watched a session on Microsoft Research's thoughts for future synchronization/concurrent (e.g. RaceTrack, Cω, etc) while I also watched an interesting panel on the future of RSS (with Microsoft, Newsgator, etc).

Now I'm waiting for overflow sessions to start for the next block. There's always the possibility that no sessions will overflow this late in the conference, but that simply means I can go and get a seat in any of the other rooms of my choice.

I spent a long night talking to the Windows Installer and WiX development teams. More on all of this later.

Categories: Software Development, Geekery, Windows Installer, Conferences

Today is the first day of PDC 2005. I'm here in Los Angeles with thousands of other developers listening to Microsoft's encouragement to develop on their new platforms.

I'm taking some detailed notes with the free copy of OneNote they gave us. Kinda handy, but I'm not totally sold yet.

Highlights from the first half of Day 1 in no particular order:

• Sidebar and Auxiliary displays
  • Sidebar is back in Vista (probably beta 2)
  • They're hyping the auxiliary displays for laptops/PCs. These are little color LCD and buttons on the outside of your laptop that lets you quickly check appointment data, email, etc, while the machine is off.
  • People can write things for sidebar/aux by visiting microsoftgadgets.com
• They offered ~2000 very cool PDA phones which I was too late to buy. (cry)
• I really want to try Office 12 which they showed-off for the first time today.
  • Really like the new menuing plans, though screen real estate is eaten.
  • They're redoing UI because 9/10 of features requested for Microsoft Office already exist, but users can't find them.
  • Outlook emails now have a very easy way to mark them as things to handle later. I like how it works/looks, though it's a small gain. Still, I want it now.
  • Outlook can replace FeedDemon/NewsGator as it has a lot of new RSS support.
• From the what-in-the-world department, they showed-off somehow using USB Memory sticks as virtual memory expansion in Vista. Very very cool especially combined with their virtual memory optimization additions ("superfetch"), but I have so many questions about this. It doesn't make sense and seems like an easy feature to cut from release.
• I love LINQ/DLINQ/XLINQ/etc. Basically, they showed-off very cool .NET language constructs for doing queries in the language itself, without a need for SQL, etc. These can be off of a database or you can actually query any collection of objects. I can't wait to play with it. At the moment, I rate this as the most interesting announcement.
• We saw some really cool Avalon apps demo'd. One you can try yourself is Max, a photo sharing application. It was designed and managed by one of their Usability leads as a test of Avalon and XAML. I must say the application looks nice, but I can't try it because my laptop runs on Vista and it won't install. (They demo'd it on Vista, though.)

That covers most of the things I've seen thus far. I've been to a couple of sessions, but neither of them seem very impressive compared to the keynotes and the overall cool atmosphere.

More soon!

Categories: Software Development, Conferences