My first post of the PDC...

This is my first post at the PDC – not my fault.  The communication network provided at the LA Convention Center didn’t work until late this afternoon.  Nothing – zippo.  I was grumpy.  Soo much to say, especially after today’s Key Note.

The Key Note was great.  After giggling to myself at how 7000 people jammed through the doors – running to the front just to get a seat in front of Bill Gates – I grabbed my seat and began to take notes with MindManager 2002.  I decided not to use One Note, because I’ve never done anything really productive with Mind Manager and it seems really cool.   Turns out, it’s REALLY cool and it did a great job organizing notes and my thoughts.   Thinking I might post the file at the end of the session (by the way, Mind Manager is tablet aware).   Bill kicked it all off, laying down the foundation for the rest of the conference.  Nice job Bill.  After Bill, Jim Allchin took over.  Jim is a great presenter.  Don Box and Chris Anderson (… Mr. Anderson) showed off their typing skills with the demos.  Honestly, I really enjoy Don Box – but this looked WAY too scripted.  Needed to be WAY more relaxed – but all the demos worked, so I won’t complain.

The focus is clearly Longhorn here – in the perspective of the developer.  Some VERY nice stuff coming, really extending presentations (yay Vector based GUI) – code named Avalon.  Then there is WinFS – one word – finally!  Lots of great demos there – picture Search Folders in Outlook – but with the file system – then way more.  When this all comes together, we’ll be building some AMAZING apps – but that won’t come for a while.  Not really much we can do to prepare expect keep building apps on the framework – and keep using web services.

I want to point on one little misconception, however.  There was a demonstration of “click once” deployment with Longhorn.  Basically, they launched a web page – then with one click downloaded and instantiated a smart client application.  Yup – nice.  But you can do that today with 1.1 of the framework.  Go read Duncan’s chapter.

After the session, I met up with a MS friend from Winnipeg – almost literally bumping into him.  Talked about BizTalk over lunch… good fun.  I then literally bumped into another friend of mine – Ralph.  I haven’t seen Ralph in 9 years – really great to see him, except I lost him in the Managed Code in Yukon session.  Funny, as I wrote the last sentence, he walked by (nice!)  – however, I was able to catch the Avalon session with him.

FINALLY met up with Duncan.  We went for a quick supper at Denny’s (sorry Julia).  Came back – got my butt kicked on Xbox. Now I’m blogging.  I’m going to write a major summary at the end of it all.                                     

GREAT expo by the way.

Anyway… I’m very tired.