Day 1 Sessions and PDC Underground: Grok Talks
Tuesday, 13th September, 2005
Another disappointing day, thankfully somewhat reprieved by the evening 'PDC Underground: Grok Talks' event held by the Microsoft Regional Directors in a hotel just down the road from the conference centre.
It was an early start, catching the shuttle bus at 6.45am to arrive in time for breakfast at 7am and then the first keynote at 8.30am. The 'Best Seat in the House' prize meant I was one of 10 winners who had an excellent view of the main proceedings (albeit one with THREE HUNDRED 'journalists' in front and to the side of us - Bill is obviously big news!). The coolest thing about the seats, aside from the fact they were comfy, reclined and had everone looking at us with green faces of envy, was having Don Box walk by and congratulate us on winning our seats.
Bill Gates talked for the first hour, and it was a pretty insipid affair - just as every other keynote I've heard him give has been. In fact I'd swear this was the same keynote I've heard several times already over the last few years, with its numerous references to the 'digital lifestyle', this being 'the best time to be in the industry' and how major this next set of releases was going to be (although thankfully we didn't get the 'We're betting the company on this' line we've had so often in the past). Lots of words that on the surface sounded impressive until you analysed what was being said and realised it had very little real content. The highlight was a spoof video of Bill's campus recruiting tour, featuring the star of an American nerd movie. It showed Bill acting convincingly and demonstrated that he can send himself up something chronic if the occasion demands it. I don't think the sight of Bill on roller skates being pulled along by a nerd riding a bike will ever leave me, or the end shot of him dancing enthusiastically 'nerd' style. Amazingly this was omitted from the live webcast with some disclaimer about the material being confidential to the PDC attendees! A great shame as I think it would have done a lot to improve Bill's somewhat humourless image for those who couldn't attend PDC.
Jim Allchin followed and wasn't really much better than Bill. Too much use of the phrase 'this is really cool' when it wasn't really warranted made him sound rather lame at times, especially when we got into gadgets in the Vista sidebar (a straight steal of Apple's dashboard and widgets). Unfortunately although this section was fast-paced (and, according to Allchin, omitted some demo's that had been planned) it over-ran by a long way and the first set of real sessions had to be abandoned as a result.
By far the best section of the keynote was a coding demo of Avalon, Indigo and Atlas all being used to quickly build a rather neat application showing off many of the new features on their way in Windows Vista and WinFX. Don Box lead the team but because things were running so late it was really rushed.
One other major flaw was the announcement of a new Pocket PC/Phone available in 'limited numbers' to attendees for USD 149 instead of a price that varied according to who you spoke to (Allchin referred to the usual price as being USD1000, others have indicated USD500 is nearer the mark). Given that this 'sold out' over an hour before the end of the keynote it is fairly obvious that numbers were so limited as to be practically useless (suggestions are that there were 250 units available with 7000 attendees up for the offer). WIth no wireless access working inside the main hall the 'lucky' winners were those who walked out of the keynote to place their orders. I fail to see how encouraging people to leave an important keynote to get themselves a price reduction on a piece of hardware helps promote the new announcements that are being revealed.
In summary it's fair to say we got a rather lacklustre keynote. Four hours with no break is ridiculous, and given the tight schedules over the next few days a ton of cancelled sessions, caused by the over-run, is pretty unacceptable as far as this attendee is concerned. One wonders what on earth happened to the so-called 'rehearsals' of this keynote. Ultimately I felt that the feverish excitement just before the keynote, caused primarily by the way things had been over-hyped prior to PDC (all that talk of how we were all going to be 'blown away' with stuff that hadn't been announced before now) had all but evaporated immediately after it.
There was really no time for lunch, so for me it was a case of taking a (very) quick tour of the exhibition area, the main focus, at least as far as most of the attendees I witnessed were concerned, seemingly being to grab as many free t-shirts and other 'useless crap' from the various vendors as was humanly possible. Still, the area had a buzz to it that had been severely lacking from the keynote.
My first session was 'Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software: 2005 Edition' given by Hillel Cooperman who works for the team that put together the Max demo of a good Avalon application for managing photo albums. This was a good post-lunch session in that it was pretty lightweight and full of humour, but I felt it was pretty much a 10 minute talk stretched out to 85 minutes. The main focus seemed to be taking the mickey out of some of the existing Windows error messages or print dialogues, with an overview of the 'Max' application user interface tacked on at the end. 'Max' is impressive but, ultimately, I didn't think this session lived up to its title, and it was hard to see an application that has accessibility issues (no keyboard shortcuts and complete reliance on use of a mouse) as a shining example of good U.I.
A better session was 'Choosing the right presentation technology: Avalon, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE and more'.Again this really didn't live up to its title or abstract, being more of an overview of certain technologies than any kind of explanation as to what to use when. Again I felt this was more marketing material rather than developer-focused material. I thought the answer to the rather obvious question 'What does this offer that isn't already available today with Flash' was perhaps the most revealing thing in the whole session. 'It's what our customers are asking for' came across as rather lame (if the only real answer that could be given). Chalk one up to Macromedia then!
My final session was 'IE7: What's new in IE'. Again this was very disappointing and very high level. It basically seemed to be a slide version of the IE7 white paper that was released at the same time as beta 1. Very little real meat, and nothing 'new' for the average developer who's already downloaded the beta and played with it. I left after 45 minutes, feeling the will to live draining away!
Today was also the day we got the infamous 'The Goods' DVD set. And, again, it turned out to be a huge disappointment, even if it was very beautifully packaged. This had been touted as 30GB of new and exclusive software. In reality it was months old copies of software that has been on MSDN for some time (Visual Studio beta 2, SQL Server June CTP etc). The single exception was a PDC build of Vista, but early indications are that it is not much different from the Beta 1 that has been freely available for some time, and several speakers acknowledged that the version of Vista they were using in their talks was a later version than that available in the goody pack. Conspicuous by its absence was Beta 1 of Office 12, which early blog reports had indicated would be given to attendees. Given that the keynote focussed so much on this, and there are an exceedingly large number of sessions at PDC focused on Office 12, it is pretty poor that PDC attendees are not going to get the beta version and are at least 6 months away from being able to do anything with the release that is being featured in so many talks here. Very poor show Microsoft!
Fortunately things improved in the evening when I attended a 'word of mouth' PDC Underground event, seemingly put together by a bunch of Regional Directors. With free food and booze, this was an excellent series of eight 'grok talks' - sessions limited to just 15 minutes. This was excellent stuff and i learnt some new stuff about Visual Studio code snippets, the ASP.NET provider pattern, GDI transformations, AJAX today and ATLAS tomorrow, Windows Forms 2 Tips and Tricks, using the VB 'my' classes from C# and a few other bits and pieces too. All attendees were given a CD containing videos of previous short grok talks too. An excellent end to what had otherwise been a very disappointing day.
