Blogging from Meltdown

I'm presenting my Visual C++ productivity tips talk at the Windows Gaming conference, also known as Meltdown 2005. As you can see from the picture, it's got quite the super hero theme going for it this year. For those that are curious, each of those characters represents an aspect of Windows game development and from left to right their names are: Winman, Pixelicious, Direx, Shadyr, and Radiance.

Mike Morhaime, the president of Blizzard Entertainment, gave this morning's keynote speech where he spoke of the trials and tribulations of releasing such popular games. Interesting nugget of information he gave us, there are 9 games that Blizzard has developed that have never seen the light of day...

My colleague Kang Su Gatlin is currently giving his talk on optimizing code in Visual C++ 2005, and he's showing off new features like Profile Guided Optimization (we just call it "Pogo"). If you want to get a piece of this experience, you can check out one of his numerous Channel 9 interviews. Speaking of Channel 9, Robert Scoble is hiding out somewhere at this conference waiting to find cool people to interview (perhaps yours truly?). My talk is at the end of the day, after which there's a big bash at the Garage Billiards & Bowl.