Entries Tagged 'PDC' ↓

I guess Microsoft has or will be canceling PDC 2007 this year due to the fact there is really nothing to talk about. (Windows Server 2008 will be announced at Dev Connections, SQL Server 2008 “Katmai” was introduced at BI Conference in Seattle, Silverlight was announced at Mix07 and Visual Studio “Orcas” has already been announced and given out as a CTP2 to MSDN subscribers.)

This is a bit disappointing because this is my favorite Microsoft Conference and its been almost 2 years since I went to one. If I had known this earlier I would have signed up for Mix 07 or Tech*Ed 07.

After using Vista for about 3 weeks I came to the conclusion that I could not continue to have it as my primary Windows computer. It’s far too buggy for day to day usage. Sure it’s in beta but I don’t recall XP beta being this bad.

The biggest problem is that anything that uses Direct X was giving me headaches. The lack of proper drivers for my graphics card played a huge factor.

There were several other bugs that were also annoying. The one cool feature of rendering the application window as a thumbnail as you hovered over the taskbar would quickly get confused on what window it owned and should render. Yes that’s a small thing but it bugged the hell out of me!

IE 7 kept crashing on me. It still has a long way to go when it comes to properly handling sites designed using the latest CSS 2.0 standards.

The fact that I could not get my RAID controller to work should have stopped me right there from installing it.

When the next beta comes out, I will probably try it again. Until then, it’s XP for now.

Keynote

Microsoft is releasing a set of tools that will allow you to create Avalon files, 3d tool to manipulate avalon files and new HTML designer. The new HTML is 1000% better than frontpage and from what I’ve seen is going to blow dreamweaver away! Pretty damn cool.

They also showed off the new Sharepoint portal services and how cool Infopath is going to work with it. Again like my previous post, Office 12 is going to change the way we do things. 2003 was a good start with with server integration, but this version is amazing. It always takes Microsoft 2 to 3 times to get it right but when they do its great. Sharepoint is really going to be that awesome product I’ve wanted it to be. We use it now at work but when this is released its going to be used like it should be. I am really digging InfoPath as a tool.

C# 3.0

HOLY SHIT. Anders has been smoking the good stuff! The things he is coming up with are amazing for the language. He has invented a new query API for C# called Linq. You will be able to create queries to any datasource writing C# code. I can’t explain it right now but it looks and feels right. I’ve always hated doing object oriented programming and then having to do things differently when I connected to the database. They just did not feel right together. Now this is going to change!

Tons of other features to the language. The one thing is that it takes the power of scripting languages that have used late binding but make it work in a way that your actualy using early binding! The compiler will know what your talking about and do the error checking and validation that you would not get from a scripting language. And to makes things even better, intellisense works! It’s totally wacky but I see it being the future of programming! I got a white paper from them on this and I plan to play around with this a bit and post what I find.

OK I gotta run. More tomorrow!

Sorry for this being late. I had so much to see this day that I did not get much time to get onto a computer and post this.

They keynote was GREAT!

Couple of things:

1) Microsoft has been paying attention to what Apple has been up to. Since PDC 2003, when they first introduced Longhorn, the OS has gone through an other make over. Many things that were introduced in 10.3 and 10.4 of OS X are now in Vista. And they have now taken it to the next level. This is a good thing. It only makes the OS better for Microsoft and Apple. Now I can’t wait to see what Apple is going to do to leap frog Vista. We still have a year to go before they release this, so who knows!

2) Office 12 will be by far the best Office ever released. I’ve never been excited over an Office release, but this one is amazing! Menus are going away. Smart toolbars from the menu! Hard to explain but its going to change the way you use Office forever.

3) Avalon and Indigo are really going to make it! When they showed this stuff in 2003, I was blown away. It’s now 2 year later and its only gotten better and will have a future. Compared to what they showed us in 2001 (.net Services), I really had no faith back when I saw it because at the time it seemed to radical for Microsoft to pull off. However, 2 years was good because they figured out alot of the problems I saw back then and made it into a solild technology that I will now start learning.

4) The new Atlas components are awesome. It’s the new framework for creating AJAX applications. They even showed it working in Firefox and Safari!! Kudos to Microsoft for making sure it works with all browsers that support XMLHTTP!

3) I’m really excited about Microsoft again and they have restored my faith!

I’m here at 7:30 AM waiting for the keynote. The breakfast was much better than yesterday. They also surprised me opening up another section for people to eat. (The other side of the hall). So I am wrong, there are more people here than I thought. I’ve based this on in the past by the size of the eating area. It has to hold everyone at one time. Good I have hope again for the industry.

It should be interesting on what they are going to show at the keynote. Based on conversations at our pre conference session yesterday, there was alot of things in Office 12 that they could not talk about until after the keynote. I have a feeling based on my questions about Avalon, they are intergrating it into Office 12. It also seems that Sharepoint will play an even bigger role with the servers and the office products. I like Sharepoint, but it still has a long way to go to being an awesome product.

Time will tell!!

BTW I am writing this blog in IE 7.0 on Windows Vista in the labs. I am not impressed by how SLOWWWWW the browser is. Even typing this blog, its having a hard time keeping up with my typing. But then again this could be a cytrix version of the OS. Did I ever tell you how much I think Cytrix sucks!

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.