My girlfriend and I are still suffering from jetlag. We flew out to the Microsoft Office Dev. Con. last week in Redmond, and it's taking an age to get over it. Cant sleep at night, cant wake up in the morning. Nothing like walking into work at half nine and getting "the look" from your fellow coworkers/slaves.
It was a good conference I have to say. I was very keen to go as my best friend lives and works out that way, and it offered a great opportunity to see him again, and his lovely wife. Had a blast. The gf spent her time visiting Seattle ( again ) and Bellevue. Oh, and if you want gooood coffee, Victor's in Redmond do a killer Almond Joy latte. Coffee, not just for mornings.
Take home from the conference:
Avoid making eye contact with fellow delegates. Can only lead to conversations.
Root beer is addictive. Take it easy.
Sit near an exit during sessions. If you gotta go, you best go NOW. Holding it in is bad for you.
Don't expect a cameraphone to be able to take a portrait photo of Bill Gates during his keynote speech from 30 feet, in the dark.
I think the coolest thing I saw during my 5 days at Microsoft was the ASP.NET 2.0 web part controls ( that and some dude using an iBook in the middle of one of the sessions; now thats a bold statement at an MS conference). I've been working with SharePoint Services and Portal Server 2003 for over a year now, and web parts are in my geeky opinion, tres hot. I've had the Whidbey beta 1 framework SDK installed on a VM on my work laptop for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity to play so far, and it was nice to just kick back in a session and have someone demo it. Good work MS.
I hope the Mono guys can keep up. I really love their work, and pull down the latest builds to my PowerBook whenever they are available. My one big gripe is MonoDevelop. For those not in the know, this is a pseudo-port of the SharpDevelop open-source .NET IDE on Windows. You can get binaries for it on Linux on the PC, but not for the mac. It's infuriating because I can not for the life of me get it to build on my machine. I've never been all that happy with the dozens of dependencies and downright weird build problems that open-source tends to have, and I pray that some kind soul out there makes a DMG image of the binaries so I can finally develop for .NET on my Apple.
If you are into .NET on non-microsoft platform, another project to watch is SWF, Mono's System.Windows.Forms implementation. Here is a link to a good blog on the subject.
It was a good conference I have to say. I was very keen to go as my best friend lives and works out that way, and it offered a great opportunity to see him again, and his lovely wife. Had a blast. The gf spent her time visiting Seattle ( again ) and Bellevue. Oh, and if you want gooood coffee, Victor's in Redmond do a killer Almond Joy latte. Coffee, not just for mornings.
Take home from the conference:
I think the coolest thing I saw during my 5 days at Microsoft was the ASP.NET 2.0 web part controls ( that and some dude using an iBook in the middle of one of the sessions; now thats a bold statement at an MS conference). I've been working with SharePoint Services and Portal Server 2003 for over a year now, and web parts are in my geeky opinion, tres hot. I've had the Whidbey beta 1 framework SDK installed on a VM on my work laptop for a while now, but haven't had the opportunity to play so far, and it was nice to just kick back in a session and have someone demo it. Good work MS.
I hope the Mono guys can keep up. I really love their work, and pull down the latest builds to my PowerBook whenever they are available. My one big gripe is MonoDevelop. For those not in the know, this is a pseudo-port of the SharpDevelop open-source .NET IDE on Windows. You can get binaries for it on Linux on the PC, but not for the mac. It's infuriating because I can not for the life of me get it to build on my machine. I've never been all that happy with the dozens of dependencies and downright weird build problems that open-source tends to have, and I pray that some kind soul out there makes a DMG image of the binaries so I can finally develop for .NET on my Apple.
If you are into .NET on non-microsoft platform, another project to watch is SWF, Mono's System.Windows.Forms implementation. Here is a link to a good blog on the subject.
Comments
I think the problems always been the Gtk# stuff. Please correct me if I'm wrong.