PDC Day 2 - When the police ask you to get out of the vehicle, please get out of the vehicle

I'm writing this on Thursday morning (day 3), but I wanted to post what happened yesterday...

Day 2...

After my last post, I visited the Tools and Languages Track Lounge and answered a bunch of customer questions on everything from Web projects, to VS Extensibility.  I was able to attend a session on Reliable Distributed Applications (Indigo).  Very cool stuff shown that makes communication between applications and machines more reliable by guaranteeing message delivery, message order and transactions.

After the sessions were all over I tried to download the daily build of the VS SDK, but the wireless connection was simply too slow here at the conference and I ran out of time before I had to head off to a partner meeting.  5 of us in VS Core met with a partner regarding the new VS SDK.  There will be more on this in a few days.

Instead of getting to the attendee party at Universal Studios, I went back to the hotel and finished the download of the SDK.

Doing what the police ask...

At about 3:00am I was awakened by the sound of a bullhorn on the street (I'm 11 floors up) asking a cab driver to get out of his vehicle.  I jumped up to look out the window and saw a police vehicle just behind a taxi cab.  At first the cab was pulled over on the side of the road and the police kept asking for the driver to get out of the vehicle.  The cab then started to pull away slowly and the police started to follow and continued screaming from the bullhorn for the driver to stop and get out of the vehicle.  Finally the cab stopped in the middle of the road a few feet away and the driver got out with his hands raised.  The police got out of their car with guns drawn.  One officer ran over to the driver, grabbed him and ran him over to the sidewalk.  I was unable to see what happened there because the officer and driver were under a tree on the sidewalk.  The other officer with gun still drawn inspected the cab to make sure there was no one else in it.  Well, after that little excitement I went back to sleep...

The excitement never stops...

One of the meta-points I've noticed during the show when talking with customers and listening to them at lunch, on the sidewalk and on the bus is that the optimism is extremely high.  I'd say the PDC attendees are typically skeptical and vocally so.  This year I'm noticing a lot of enthusiasm and approval of what is being shown.  The WinFX changes, LINQ, Window Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Window Workflow Foundation, Office 12, all the tools changes are making a real impression and our customers seem convinced that the future is bright.  I couldn't agree more.

PDC05 Pedometer Facts...

I've been wearing my pedometer 24x7 during the PDC.  As of this morning, I've walked 10.13 mi (16.3 km), 27919 steps, burned 1200 calories.

I'll be posting more later today.

Allen