PDC Day 1 - Power Outages and Uploads

Well, yesterday was very eventful.

Just after my previous post, we broke for lunch and just as we were starting to present our after-lunch information the power went out in Los Angeles.  Not just in the Convention Center, but all over the city.  According to reports 2 million people were affected.  It was an interesting 30-45 minutes as we sat around in the dark (a little bit of illumination from ambient light).  We finally got up on stage and did some general Q&A.  The power finally came back on and we were able to continue our preconference session without further incident.

During my portion of the precon, I wrote a To Do Manager from scratch (ok, practically from scratch).  This is the same demo that I did at the Dev Lab in August on campus.  The code for this demo has been posted on GotDotNet.  This code project requires the Sep 05 CTP of the VS SDK and is expected to work with Visual Studio 2005.  I wrote it using a recent VS 2005 release candidate (internal), but it should work with any VS 2005 RTM Release Candidate.

After the precon our VS partner program hosted a little party at Dodger Stadium for a few partners.  The Dodgers did very well and it was a nice treat to see a big league game in a beautiful stadium.  It was fun talking with partners and letting our hair down a little bit.

This morning I attended BillG's and JimAll's keynotes.  They were both very good.  Don Box, Chris Andersen, Scott Guthrie and Anders Hejlsberg were very good as usual.  Windows Vista is awesome, our programming model and frameworks are really powerful and it is truly a great time to be a software developer.

Fun facts: My pedometer is still going. Totals for the week as of Tue morning: 5.49 miles, 15136 steps. Since the last report this represents 2.88 miles walked.

More on the PDC later.

Allen