PDC Day 1, Lunch Time

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!