PDC 2008, Day 3

I got finished late yesterday, so sorry this post is coming so late.

Yesterday was yet another blast.  I got up, had a “real” breakfast in the hotel buffet (I’m not sure it was actually better than the breakfast at the PDC though :().  Then I headed over to the conference center. 

I spent most of the morning hanging out in the speakers lounge catching up on email, then I headed down to the floor to talk to attendees in the Win7 Lounge.  It was a great deal of fun, I was astonished at the interest in the sensor platform – the sensor guys were giving out development kits and one guy literally spent the entire 3 hours I was there running back and forth between the sensor booth and their storage closet getting more kits.

I was also really surprised at the excitement around the touch machines.  I honestly didn’t think that touch was that big a deal, but it was clear that there’s a real excitement about the platform.

I also got a chance to chat with Raymond Chen while we were hanging out, which was fun.  I then tried to see his talk, but his first room overflowed and then the overflow room overflowed.  So I left to let a paying customer use my chair.

I ended up spending most of my afternoon wandering around chatting with people and generally keeping busy and then came the “Ask The Experts”.

“Ask The Experts” is the part of the conference where attendees can come in and ask the Microsoft developers any questions they want.

The attendees arrive:

The Desktop team answers questions:

I was at a table with Frank Biger of the Windows Telemetry team, Crispin Cowan of the UAC team, a couple of folks from the internationalization team.  We fielded a couple of great questions and then the director of development for WEX stopped by and hung out with us for a while.  I’m not sure that the people asking questions realized that the guy answering their questions was the guy who ran the entire development organization in WEX :).

After the A-T-E, I went back to my hotel room, called my cousin Stacy (we’re getting together this afternoon) and chatted with Valorie.

I then did the final rehearsal of my PDC talk and went to bed.

This morning, I had my tech check (at 7:40 AM :() and now I’m in the speakers lounge chilling until about 11:30 when I’m going to go set up for my 12:00PM talk.