Summary of my first day at the PDC

After a wonderful Sunday at Venice beach, having a beer and fish and chips at a Irish pub, the jet lag hit us and we had a hard time staying awake. It made us miss one of the parties of the PDC, but after all, we are here for work, aren’t we?

So this morning we got up at 6:30 AM but still didn’t make it to the start of the key note speech on Monday. But, when we got there, I felt we hadn’t missed much. Key note speeches don’t make a successful conference. We sat it out, but next time, I will leave early if the speeches are that boring.

I attended a (what turned out to be) basic demonstration of Sharepoint and having learned my lesson at the key note speech I did leave that early this time.

I visited the CodeGear booth, got a t-shirt, and was told the Prism DVD doesn’t have anything that I don’t already have. I got to speak to my family using Skype (which was a first to me) and was able to kiss my son to sleep which was a great bonus.

I had a chance to catch up with the ‘Partner manager’ for MS Surface and later attended a presentation on MS Surface. And to me, that was the absolute top of the Monday. The presentation was pretty funny, and the stuff the guys showed was really awesome. If you never had your hands on a MS Surface table: try to do so. It’s a fun and exciting experience.

The presentation showed what Microsoft has done to make the life of the developer easier and it appears they have done an excellent job on that. It is amazing to see how good the assembly for using the MS Surface library matches the things you know already about programming in the modern MS languages. It’s looks to be very easy to sit down and write your first Surface program.

And if you were there, you will get the Surface SDK and you can do so. And I for one will definitely will, because I have some great ideas for it. I will also try to use it from Prism (no reason why we couldn’t). I will let you know the results when doing so…

Bye,

Bart