October 29, 2003
PDC 2003: Day 3
Found this article about the trouble and the extents developers went to in order to get down here to the PDC.
They had Segway scooters here to ride but the lines where always too long. I wanted to try it out. The auto-balancing looks pretty weird in person.
Today, I learned about the new Visual Studio Tools for Microsoft Office. The basically are embedding and combining the Office development tools into Visual Studio so that you can have a consistent development environment. Maybe its time to migrate Orion Outcomes up to Access 2003 from the ever solid Access 97 that it still lives in.
Went to a talk on Windows Installer -- my favorite topic, wink, wink. They basically talked about all the things they are fixing because of the problems they have. Mostly working on building better patching tools. In version 4.0, that ships with Longhorn, they are working on a concept to get rid of reboots. The bad news is that the programmer has to deal. I sort of hoped that they could do this without developers having to do anything, but I guess not. They also keep showing slides on why you might want to use Windows Installer and when you will want to use ClickOnce, their new next-gen Longhorn install technology. I hate installers. Yet another choice of technologies. Hope this one delivers. MSI didn't for me.
Tonight we are off to Universal Studios. Bill rented out the place for us. All you can eat and ride in 3 hours. Eat, puke, enjoy.
One of the other fun things here is the massive blogging that is going on. Blogging didn't exist at the last PDC...before its time. Now everyone is commenting on what they saw and posting it right after the breakout. Its a cool way to have conversations with people you haven't met but have lots in common with. Here is the site dedicated to it. Some people have these t-shirts that say "I am blogging this". I want one, but don't know where you get them. Maybe somebody with one will read this and tell me how.
Don Box is cool. I went to a few of his presos. His slides basically have titles on them and he just talks to the points. I wish they had more talks like his. Its more theory-ish...vs. just sitting and watching dudes right really simple code to demonstrate new features like I am watching right now.
My 2nd battery of the day is about dead. I need a new laptop!
