Notes from the PDC - Day 1

Wow! What a first day! Incredible keynotes and a tremendous amount of excitement from developers and managers alike regarding all the new technologies we're rolling out.

I was also very happy to see a nice turnout at the MSDN Online booth where we showed people the new features regarding MSDN - especially the Help Forums and the fact that Visual Studio 2005 integrates many distinct sources in order to produce truly helpful search results. This includes pulling information from MSDN Online, your local MSDN Library, Codezone (a collection of the most popular third-party Web sites) and the MSDN Forums!!

As a result, you can finally get the answers you need without having to browse to all of these various sources yourself!!

We're also working on a new version of online MSDN as well as greatly improving the online search. If you're here at the PDC, drop by the MSDN Booth and we'll show you what the team is currently working on!

Finally, while we're on the topic, I would strongly recommend to those of you at the PDC to visit the Hands On Lab in the "Big Room". There are huge volumes of labs that will walk you through learning the basics of working with the new Visual Studio, Windows Forms, .NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Windows WorkFlow Foundation and more! There are also some great folks walking around in dark-blue shirts that are doing a wonderful job and will definitely help you out if you need it.