PDC05: Windows Internals Pre-Con (#1)

David Soloman and Mark Russinovich did an excellent job tailoring their typically infrastructure-oriented Windows Internals course to fit us PDC attendees.

My head is still swimming, but now I feel like I at least have a baseline grasp of the terminology and tools for delving into topics ranging from processes, threads, memory allocations, working-sets, page files, security tokens, and ACL's. 

I especially enjoyed the primer on AMD x64 and Itanium 64-bit processors and how they are supported in WinXP/2003.   This primer will be helpful in the future as my employer has already begun upgrading Sql Server boxes to multi-proc 64-bit hardware - and we will likely continue to gradually move further this direction in the future.

David and Mark's banter, hokey hacks, and lots of nifty tools from SysInternals made the deep dive into NToskrnl.dll and other obscure OS topics far more interesting and enjoyable.    This was a good first session to start things off for PDC05.  

 I'm also looking forward to Tuesday night at the PDC Underground.  The list of regional directors involved is practically identical to my most visited blogs in my RSS Reader's OPML.  Now I just have to convince David - who would rather go to the Mono PDC user-group meeting - and Zach - who has already gone to bed.  Speaking of which, I guess I'm about to head that way myself...

Tomorrow; PreCon #2 - "Framework Design Guidelines: The Art of Building a Reusable Class Library" presented by Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina.