PDC 2005 Day 1 - Part 1

So the first keynote was very long. It was good though. They told us we could buy an i-mate JASJAR at mobile planet for $149. But when the session got out they were sold out. Apparently they had 1000 for nearly 10,000 people. I went to mobile Planet the day before to buy a bluetooth head set which was $45 which I thought was a good deal, the guy at the store said to wait until after the key note, apparently there was a deal. At the key note Jim Allchin said we could buy one for $9.95 but they are sold out also. :(

Now I am wearing a hat around in the hopes that I get spotted and win one.

The coolest thing I saw in the Key note was LINQ. This is a feature of the .net framework that lets you write queries against any collection. In Anders Hejlsberg words, “If you can for each it you can query it” He and Don Box proceeded to query a collection of processes running on that machine. Then they added a text box to a web page and allowed the user to query for processes using a where clause. That is cool in it self but wait there is more, then they accessed a Database table which contained a process name and description. They Joined the collection of processes to the table in the Database and also displayed the description in the result set. :) Very Very Cool. All of this was done in C#.

We were also given a preview of Office 12. The new interface is really nice. I think my grandmother could have used Excel if it looked like this.  

Apparently I can go and pick up “The Goods“ anytime also. This will contain 6 DVD's full of Beta's and CTP's.

I sat in on a VSTS session a lot of it was nothing new. But these was a demo at the end that was good. Doug Neumann created a C# application that made calls using the TFS object model. Using a utility he turned it into a TFS Web service to notify a developer when they break the build. The extensibility of this product is amazing.

I have to get out there now so someone sees me in my hat. <|:)