MEDC 2005 - Photo's from the event - and Podcasting, worth it ?

Here’s a quick photo wrap up of MEDC 2005 – for me this was a fun packed event, with non-stop sessions, press meetings, podcast interviews – it really does make sense to combine the Mobile and Embedded conferences together, there’s a ton of overlap content around the base operating systems, application development, etc…

So, what happened at this years MEDC event ?

First, this was the first Microsoft event to be Podcast – the XML Feed is still live, so you can subscribe and get the content, we still have some content to upload to the site, so look out for this over the next few days…

And here’s Craig and Mike working hard on editing the video/audio interviews ready to get uploaded to the site.

The MEDC Keynote contained a number of cool demos, first up was Ford Davidson providing an overview of the Windows Mobile 5.0 user experience, applications, media etc…

Next up was Mike Hall who built a Windows XP Embedded touch screen kiosk which could be used to send themes, applications, or services to a Windows Mobile device.

The next two demos were all about code (gotta love that!) – first up was Neil Enns who provided a really cool demo of Visual Studio 2005 and some of the new Windows Mobile 5.0 managed API’s to support camera, notifications, and data sync.

Last (but not least) up was Seth Demsey who developed a multiplayer game of “squares” which took advantage of the new Visual Studio 2005 designers to handle screen rotation, support of COM objects directly from the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, and a bunch of other cool features.

Check out the keynote video to get the whole story…

I like this shot, which shows BillG talking about Windows Mobile/Embedded and clearly shows both logos, and the word “Reliable”… 

Some of the feedback about MEDC I heard on site was how useful it is to meet with the developers that work on the Embedded Operating Systems, Windows Mobile software, and the development tools for O/S and applications – after each session speakers could be found at the Speaker Cabana to answer questions about their session or lab – check out the image below of Anil Dhawan deep in discussion about the Windows Embedded Source Tools for Bluetooth.

I ran a series of hands on labs at the event, each lab room was full (which was great!) – I also dropped in on a number of other labs, these also seemed to be full – which raises an interesting question Do you prefer to learn in an Instructor Led lab, or a self paced lab ? – my preference is Instructor Led, I feel that this environment adds value to the underlying lab material, of course it’s cool to run through a lab, click in all the right places, paste source code, build and walk out of the lab room having achieved something, but, I personally think that you learn more by having a lab instructor in the room explaining WHY you are doing something, and HOW something works – thoughts ?

Attendees at the conference had access to the internet through the Communications network and could get online using the wireless access points dotted around the event – if you blogged from the event let me know your blog address…

Err… Excuse me sir, I think there’s a sticker on the back of your head… (I wonder if he knew…)

The event also had a live radio broadcast running from 5pm – 6pm each day this is being run by Computer Outlook – there are a number of interviews from the event, including Nick White, Chris Hill, Chris Johnston, Chris DeHerrera, Dan Javnozon, Mike Hall, Diana Dumas – pretty cool, check it out. 

The Computer Outlook radio show was setup on the edge of the exhibition area at the conference, there was a ton of interesting stuff to look at, perhaps more on this later… one of the cool things to see/play with was the Windows Automotive Hummer H2

The event wasn’t all about sessions and technical content, there were also some fun activities going on…

The delegate party was held at the Luxor hotel and included a visit to the Blue Man Group for the 7pm showing

The event is held in Las Vegas, so it would have been extremely rude for Elvis to not make an appearance… Here’s Elvis (a.k.a. Mike Stein, the Podcast Crew audio guy!)

At last years Embedded Developers Conference we held a Sumobot competition which went down pretty well with the attendees, so we ran another Sumobot competition this year, attendees had two options, to either write “Artificial Intelligence” code that ran directly on the Sumobot, or to write Remote Control code that communicates from a Windows Mobile device over Bluetooth to the Sumobot – pretty cool!.

And, MEDC 2005 also had the world preview of the Mobile and Embedded “Code Room” – this has me thinking that for next years MEDC event we should perhaps think about running a delegate “Code Room” set a combined Mobile and Embedded problem and have teams working on that – what do you think ?

If you’re going to the international MEDC events then take along your camera, take some photo’s and send them to me so we can see what’s going on…

Also, I'm interested in whether the MEDC Podcast feed was useful/interesting - what you liked/disliked, what we could have done more of etc... - feedback welcome...

– Mike