Well its lunch time and I have to say the food is not what it used to be. Sure it was good but they served us salad. It was a really good salad and I am not complaining because I have been trying to watch what I eat. So in a way it was good because the temptation was not there.

I can’t get over the fact on really how small this PDC is. Over half the convention center is not being used. They used to have three main halls and now they are down to two. Also I would say they are using half as many rooms for the sesssions. Hopefully less means more!

Also if it were not for the Europeans there would be no PDC. It seems like over 70% of the conversations that I have heard are in German, French, Swedish or any of the other languages of Northern Europe. The other who are talking English have a huge accent. Its great to seem them here but I have to wonder of the state of developers here in the US. PDC has always had huge Euro presence, but with half the attendees as normal, its much more noticable.

The pre conference session I have been today as been on the VSTO. This is the Visual Studio Tool for Office. Its pretty impressive what you can do with .net and Office. The VSTO is much more extensive than the Office Interop for .net. The 2005 version using .net 2.0 allows you to control more of the application. 2003 was focused highly on the office document model. It’s an all day session and I really like these because you can get into things in much greater detail. The actual developers are here and are giving really good details on how it actually works. This helps me because then I get my hands on it more when I know what’s actually going on behind the black box.

Session starts in 5 mins so I am heading there now. The good thing with it being so small is that I don’t have to trek half way across the convention center!

On first impression things seem alot smaller. Everything is not so spread out. This is a good thing. However, I think the glory days of sending people to these things are long over. The industry has matured. (Or I have and maybe I don’t get so excited over this stuff anymore) Also the spending days seem to be long over and I think the outsourcing of jobs has done it number on the industry here in the US.

The breakfast was ok. Not as good as they have been in the past. This could be because today is not the offical day of the conference. Sunday and Monday are pre conference days. I signed up for the one today because there seems to be two sessions that are very interesting to what I am doing right now with one my clients.

The WIFI is much better than it has been in the past. Right now I am sittting in a very comfortable chair doing this post.

They also have a lot of computers available to use . I jumped on it and it so different than previous conferences. So simple and easy to use than before. They finally started eating their own dog food and have you use your passport account to log in. However there is no longer a place to send emails to other conference attendees. I guess no one used it before. Oh well. It funny how stuff that they thought in the past was so important, is not.

Speaking of sending emails to others; there is no one I know hear this year. They have a OMPL of all the attendees and I could not find anyone from the past. I guess people are not working for companies that can send them to these anymore or they just got out of the business. Their is my old pal Brian Randall here from the M1 days. I go by and say hi. The last couple of times I’ve seen him he’s been quite cold to me. Not sure why. Maybe because I told him I don’t believe in all this Microsoft talk anymore. Sometimes I think that he thinks that Microsoft and Gates is the second coming!

I plan on during the week to post anything that I find interesting.

This is like my 5th PDC and I vow to do things differently this time.

• 1) Go to the birds of feather sessions
• 2) Actually go to the labs and finsih all of them
• 3) Spend most of my time at the conference.