PDC: Day Two Notes

• Started the morning at the Pavilion and continued the fun I had last night.
  • Got another question about graphics in WinFX. One guy was specifically interested in the code behind the app. I told him to come back and talk to Mitch, since he’s obviously our expert on Mantis.
  • Lots of people seemed to be interested in Mantis as a demo of what can be done with WinFX. Many people asked when they could see sample code. Mitch and MSDN should hook up on this!
  • Also spoke to a woman from ZD Journals who was interested in writing an article on Mantis and WinFX Hearts. Gave her my card, will connect her to Mitch and Adam if they’re willing to talk to her.
  • Oddly enough, very few people want to actually try out Mantis, content just to learn the underpinnings of it. I guess that’s symptomatic of the crowd that’s here.
  • Got more great feedback on the flask, good choice Hari!
  • Meeting people at the PDC is fun! I felt on a real high as I walked away.
  • Went back to the lounge in the afternoon even though I wasn’t booked there, met a few more interesting folks. Had two different people talk about how they wanted to push their management to adopt Windows Vista as early as possible so they could start to write to that platform. Granted PDC is always going to attract people who love Microsoft, but I really think there’s a clear case to be made that investing in Vista will, long term, be a competitive advantage.
  • Had a great chat with a pal of mine from when we both were at MSDN. We threw around the idea of having RSS be the engine for online updates for our content. Since Windows Vista has RSS built in, and it essentially doesn’t matter where content resides on a user’s machine, why not create an RSS downloader tool to make sure people have the latest and greatest content always available? At the very least it’s worth investigating
• Headed over to Universal Studios. Man, that Mummy ride is fun! Had a great, late night. Team bonding is cool.