Day 3 Sessions
Thursday, 15th September, 2005
It was a much quieter keynote this morning, with many attendees staying in their hotel rooms recovering from the Universal party last night. Bob Muglia, vice president of the Windows Server Edition, talked up the new features of Longhorn Server edition, scheduled for release in 2007. The introduction of transactional NTFS was something I had not heard about before, with the claim that if you turned the feature off it would have zero overhead, but that if you turned it on the overhead would be a single-figure percentage.
As part of the keynote Bob Staples gave an excellent whirlwind overview of the new features in IIS 7. The monolithic dll that the IIS dev team have struggled with is out, and in comes a modular, extremely extensible design that integrates beautifully with ASP.NET so that deployment/IIS configuration problems of the past become a simple matter of amending a web.config file. The much-loathed IIS metabase is finally laid to rest. Good stuff, and attendees today received the 'missing' DVD from the goody bag - a first beta of Windows Vista Server complete with the first early cut of IIS 7.
The offer of a free license of SQL Server Standard Edition (worth about UKP4,000) turned very sour today when those signing up with their PDC vouchers discovered some small print in the T&C that revealed only US and Canadian PDC attendees qualified. I'm happy to report that after a few of us got very vocal about how we'd been mislead an announcement was made that the site wording would be changed and that all attendees would qualify. Nice one, Microsoft!
My first session today was the second part of the ATLAS presentation, given by Nikhil Kothari, author of 'the bible' on server controls published by Microsoft Press. This was not a patch on the Part 1 talk, mainly because the format of these sessions doesn't lend itself to long, complicated code walkthroughs and Nikhil lacks the 'marketing' chutzpah of his colleague, Shanku Niyogi. That being said the session was worth attending, not least because Nikhil revealed a little 'out of hours' side project he'd been working on - a debugger for ATLAS which is available in the projects area of his blog site.
Next up was a 'Code walkthrough' session on Max, the new Avalon- and Indigo- based photo album application that's been made availabe on the Microsoft web site. I lasted 15 minutes of what I felt was an endless sales pitch for the company that had written the application. With no sign of a single line of code being shown, I left to go to the official 'Channel 9 giveway' in the main hall.
Channel 9 had a ton of free t-shirts to give out, each in random sizes with differing slogans. It all got very manic very quickly with people trying to collect all the slogans in the right t-shirt size as they were thrown out into the crowd. I managed to snag an 'Avalon - it's all about the U and I' that I can just about fit in to but alas, the 'PDC05. Because I'm worth it' one I also caught is way too small. One passer-by, seeing the madness, commented 'All these programmers on the money they earn, and they're all fighting over 2 dollar t-shirts?!'. In truth, it was a very well-behaved crowd, happy to pass on shirts they weren't interested in.
My next session was 'ASP.NET: A Sneak Peak at Future Directions'. This was another disappointment, being not what I expected, but a demonstration of the new Expession 'Quartz' web designer. Imagine someone slowly and methodically talking you through building a web site with DreamWeaver and you've pretty much got the feel of the pitch. I did stay long enough to be impressed with the CSS style sheet integration and debugging features (ASP.NET programmers are not going to get away with ignoring CSS for much longer!) and the integration with Visual Studio but it's early days yet for this product.
It was rapidly becoming clear by this stage that the sessions are of mixed value. A large dark room and people who are normally developers rather than experienced presenters is not the ideal format for learning the subtleties of complex products or lines of programming code. I decided to check out the Online Labs section of the big hall. I wish I'd checked it out earlier! At Tech-Ed I recall there being a choice of six to eight rather simplistic labs. This was a whole different ballgame! I would estimate at least 80 different labs on the new technologies, each of at least an hour in length. I worked through one of the Avalon labs and it was hard work - with a LOT of code needing to be typed and understood, but good stuff nonetheless. This was the point at which I decided that PDC really was excellent value for money - real training in a self-teach environment, but with experts on hand to answer any questions. I wish I'd checked this area out earlier. Given the poor quality of the pre-cons (discussing the pre-cons with other attendees many had similar experiences to mine, with Jeffrey Richter, Brad Abrams and Kimberly Tripp being singled out as 'the exception that proves the rule' in that their sessions were considered excellent) I'd rather have the online labs open at the same time as the first pre-con and spend a couple of days there.
My final lab was less successful than my first. I investigated the new 'Sparkle' software, which is one of the few products announced here that attendees have not been given a copy of to take away. It's not hard to see why. I couldn't get past the first page of the lab because of lockups and .NET System.NullReferenceExceptions that would crash the whole program losing all data saved up to that point. While parts of it were impressive it was the little things one is used to in all the standard graphics products that annoyed. Want to draw a square instead of rectangle? The usual universally implemented way of doing this is to hold down the SHIFT key to constrain the dimensions. It doesn't work that way in "Sparkle". If Microsoft want experienced designers to move to this product they need to fix some of these usability gaps. If my lab experience is anything to go by this product is some distance away from being 'ready for prime time'.
Thursday evening was food, beer and an 'Ask the Experts' session. Every imaginable area of Microsoft technology was covered with endless round tables clearly marked with the specific product or technology and a couple of the experts available to answer any questions. This 'walk up and ask' philosophy in a party atmosphere was very popular and incrediby well put together. I spent much of the evening on the Channel 9 table chatting to Adam and Robert Scoble and other niners. Adam and Robert, who are part of the team that run the Channel 9 web site, have really impressed me at PDC. Seemingly every night they've turned down higher profile invites to hang out with the handful of regular posters at their forums that have arranged informal meetings, despite working crazy hours at the event itself. Their enthusiasm and passion is genuine and I don't think I've seen two guys work so hard as these two at promoting Microsoft and what they do at Channel 9.
Tomorrow is the final day - more of a half-day actually, and one senses that many participants are in 'wind down' mode already, with many catching flights home early tomorrow morning (I'm here until Sunday evening).
