PDC: Days Three and Four

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Thursday September 17, 2005

  • The session on creating graphics using WPF/Avalon was terrific. The combination of relatively easy writing of code with amazing results makes this new platform a real no-brainer for many users. There was real excitement on this front, based in part on a demo in one of the keynotes, and we got all kinds of questions on it. I know I'm psyched to develop on it.
  • Nice dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown. But man, I'm getting tired of all the rich food.

Friday September 16, 2005

  • Last day of the conference, but still lots of people around. I didn't have any assignments today – I was going to help proctor Jeff's HOL but was advised that without deep training on it, I would be as much a pain as a help in proctoring. I did run into Jeff and Derek as I came in, and it sounded like the HOL went pretty well. (Jeff can address it in more detail in his report)
  • Went to a panel discussion on implementing web APIs to leverage website security and flexibility. People from Amazon, MSN Search, eBay and several other sites were there. It was an interesting discussion, not really deeply applicable to our team but good background information.
  • Next was Brent's session on the SDK. Despite some major technical glitches which he can get into, I think he did a great job in his session. Brent did a good job of covering some of the cool low-level things our tools bring to users, and did a good job of providing both the technical and theoretical ideas behind the tools. It was a little dry, but Brent pulled it off with his usual humor.
  • Last up was "WPF: Under the Hood", a nuts-and-bolts look at the architecture of "Avalon". Again, very interesting background information. Since I'm not a hardcore developer, I may have lacked some good context for the presentation, but I found the depth of information to be very interesting, and it definitely helped me to understand the quirks of Avalon a bit better.

Overall, PDC was a great experience. I really feel like I made a connection with our users, and have a much better feel for what they want from our SDKs. The answer is resoundingly clear: you guys want one SDK with all possible Microsoft information. You want good filters and search, and you want it to be available to be updated as often as new content is posted. You don't think about individual SDKs - the only SDK called out individually is MSDN - instead, you just want the information you need at your fingertips. We hear you. We'll be working in that direction over the next few weeks.