Good morning
Hey, there's nothing like six hours of sleep in a week in which we only got a decent night's sleep once. But we're not complaining (much): This week has been an incredible journey and an amazing experience for both of us. Today is a light day, with no actual sessions per se, so we're heading in for a panel on creating Longhorn user experiences and some time in the hands-on lab building Longhorn applications. After that, we might actually get out and try to see some of LA: This is Keith's first time here and he's spent the whole time in a convention center.
10/30/2003 7:14AM PST
A few reflections on the week
OK, we're not quite done here yet, but it's hard not to start thinking back on the show already and think about how things went. Overall, we're pretty happy about things--we kept posting updates, photo galleries, and videos during the week (though the Internet and local connectivity conspired to make it difficult at times), all while Paul kept writing normal WinInfo updates; one of the things we were concerned about was that people not interested in the PDC (shock, horror) would feel like we were ignoring the real world during the show. News still happens, of course. And we would have brought less stuff. Paul brought a total of four PCs, but only two were needed; we never pulled out the iBook or Tablet PC, not once (and for the record, we saw maybe two Apple laptops the entire time we were here, so anyone getting their hopes up for that can officially slink back to Cupertino). We did use the video camera extensively, shooting hours of raw video, and we audio recorded an amazing 12+ hours of sessions using OneNote, along with scads of notes. You want to talk photos? Not counting last night's party, Keith snapped over 530 photos, or about 700 MB worth. Paul took over 200 screen capture of Longhorn 4051, and installed it on two notebooks and in a virtual machine for a later review. We met with an interesting array of Microsoft personnel, bumped into several readers, and enjoyed seeing some old friends from the US and UK media; we also made some new friends, which was nice. Overall, it's been an amazing ride.
10/30/2003 7:35AM PST
Finally, a slowdown...
Today was the first day the LA Convention Center hasn't been absolutely packed--though there are certainly lots of people still here, and one of the panels was overflowing by at least 100 people. Still, it was nice to navigate through the center without constantly bumping into people. Off to the hands-on lab...
10/30/2003 9:49AM PST
Hands-on labs
The hands-on labs at PDC 2003 are awesome. We wish we had spent more time in there this week, but then we didn't exactly have a lot of free time. We both went through the first Longhorn Avalon application lab, using XAML, which looks excellent. Other labs included Longhorn with WinForms, Web services, SharePoint, .NET Framework 64-bit, AMD-64, and a bunch more. We took a few photos in the labs to give you an idea how large it was (they're on the SuperSite). Really impressive.
10/30/2003 1:17PM PST
Winding down
Even the PDC 2003 press room is finally starting to calm down, and we're pretty sure we're some of the only non-international press left here (must have something to do with the flight schedules). For several days this week, the press room was clearly over capacity, with various Pournelles entertaining others by increasingly raising their voices to be heard over each other. But most of them are gone now, thank goodness, as people rush to make their flights.
10/30/2003 1:22PM PST
Closing the press room
It looks like we're going to close yet another press room. Microsoft's PR people are packing up, the other media folks are all gone, and we're sitting here, alone, amid a mass of destruction (those reporter guys are real pigs). PDC 2003 is officially over.
10/30/2003 3:38PM PST
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Birchy October 30, 2003