PDC09 – Wednesday wrapup

So the last post I wrote about session wish list was a pack of lies (well the weather report was quite valid!). I skipped the code visualization talk for Christian Schormann’s Sketchflow talk. I had been playing with Sketchflow but I had no idea you could export the entire prototype to Word to make an outline of your spec (hooray!). Also the demos that they did with coding up behaviors and drag and dropping them into the tool was really impressive. Scottgu did an awesome Silverlight demo (iPhone demo fail aside), so I went to the Silverlight 4 beta overview, which is making me pretty excited about the possibilities for Silverlight app development and making elegant UI more easily accessible to both designers and developers.

Matt Winkler’s talk went great, the room was packed with 400 people and the demos went off without a hitch. Bob Schmidt also did a great talk on the internals today. For those of you at PDC you should check out the workflow chalk talks – Bob Schmidt is doing migration, Kushal Shah is doing rehosted debugging/workflow monitoring, and Alan Ko is doing the state machine. It’ll be great to see these guys give some demos on stuff customers have been asking about in 4.0. Also, Dustin Campbell, one of our friends on the VB IDE team, is doing a VB tips and tricks talk that should be great for anybody looking to be more productive in VB.

Been great talking to all the folks down here at PDC about workflow, AppFabric, and workflow services. There’s lots of interest in our stuff, which is encouraging, and it’s really helpful  to talk to all of these folks playing with the product, hearing about their scenarios, and getting their feedback. One more day to go, hopefully everybody will show up after getting their free laptop and we’ll have one more day for awesome conversations about workflow.