Getting ready for Devcon 2004 !
Life starts to get busy from here on in (like it's not busy enough), WinHEC 2004 is just a few weeks away, and is being held in Seattle, which makes for a short commute to give presentations! - we have 6 embedded sessions this year (up from two last year), covering application development, Windows CE Architecture, Windows CE Drivers, Windows CE O/S build/debug/deploy, Windows CE Test Kit and Windows XP Embedded, and a session from Intel titled “Implementing hi fidelity audio solutions for cellular phones using Intel XScale(R) technology”
Hot on the heels of WinHEC 2004 is the Windows Embedded Developers Conference - June 28th through July 1st in San Diego, there's a ton of session and hands on lab content being created for this conference covering Windows CE 5.0, Windows XP Embedded SP2, Visual Studio .NET 2003 (managed application development), eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 (native application development), SQLCE (bit buckets), and mobile sessions (Pocket PC and Smartphone), all content is going to be demo heavy, deep, technical (the way a conference should be, right?) - today is the session and lab abstracts review, after today we should be pretty much locked on content for the event - I spent some time yesterday looking through the submitted abstracts, I have to say that there are a bunch of sessions that I'm really looking forward to sitting through, and a set of sessions and labs I'm super excited to write and present, I was talking to that Boling fella the other day, looks like we might end up doing a double act for at least one session, that should be a real hoot...
So, sign up, get those plane tickets booked (unless you live in San Diego), and let's go... to... San Diego ! - Not sure what's planned for this years Devcon party, I will let you know when I find out - hopefully it will be better than the PDC I was working at a few years ago, the plan was to have a party in the worlds largest free standing sand structure, then some hurricane hit and wiped the whole thing out (was that 1996?) - the good news was that the party food and bands were sent out to homeless shelters around the city, the bad news was that speakers had to re-run some of the more popular sessions from the event, and even worse than that, delegates had to sit through repeated sessions (with the same old jokes!). I seem to remember one of the 'warm up' speakers for PDC that year had a “top ten ways to spot marketing slime“ slide, perhaps I can dig that out for the embedded keynote...
For an SAP “Mobility“ conference session back in 1999I wrote a “Marketing Bingo“ [the polite version of the app :O) ] application for the then “Palm-Sized PC“ - John O'Donnell, and John Wyer were also presenting at that conference - come to think about it, I think this was the last time JW gave a (semi)-technical presentation...
I will probably make the Bingo application a download from this site (written in C# of course) - I will have the application load custom words and phrases, so you can customize - let me know (through feedback) if you have any favorite marketing phrases (rich, scalable, “kick it up to the next level) etc..., the top suggestions will make it into the core application.
Busy afternoon ahead, I think it's time for a coffee... perhaps a delightful cup of Starbucks from the canteen in Building 27...
Doesn't look like there's anyone around right now, perhaps I should just go ahead and start serving coffee...
Don't forget to send those “Bingo“ words or phrases !
- Mike