Sebastian Renzi’s Blog

Hi folks,

During the last day of the PDC I attended to Stream Insight session, it was really interesting. After the session I went to the Partners hall to visit the booth I didn’t visit in the first 3 days. In my personal opinion the two main topics presented in the PDC were in first order Windows Azure and finally DATA, with “Dallas” project , “M” project, Entity Framework, etc. You can find more details in the Data Developer Center

And of course another point that people talked about a lot, was the laptop that every attendee received for “free“. As you can see I highlighted free. In life nothing is for free, in some cases you pay with money and in other cases you pay differently but you never get rid of the payment. In my opinion giving for “free” this laptop was a very clever idea. Multi touch screens are very well known but they are not very massive. And Microsoft with this decision will have in the following months 4000 technical leaders testing Windows 7 Multi Touch APIs, giving feedback and helping Microsoft to enhance the upcoming versions. So, as a final conclusion we can say that the ~4000 attendees that were beneficiated with the laptop (without free word ) will be paying them with testing, technology evangelism and feedback. Good deal for both parts .

These 5 days experience was incredible, you learn a lot of things from many areas, of course you learn tips and presentation skills from great speakers, from all sessions and Keynotes I attended I choose Steven Sinofsky and Scott Hanselman, they have that special don to keep the audience always captive. You can also learn and see how to organize an event for 4000, how can 4k people eat in a timeframe of 1 hour without any kind of problem. In a scale from 1 to 10 I give without any doubt a 10.

Finally I would like to thank Southworks and specially Johnny Halife and Martin Salias for helping me make this dream possible.

Today took place the second Keynote. The one in charge was Steven Sinofsky, the president of the Windows Division at Microsoft. The Keynote was basically focused on Windows 7, in my opinion, it was a great Keynote, specially the part when he showed in numbers the hard work they did, like for example how many unknown devices were plugged in (< 800.000), how many bug reports were received and how many unknown software was installed (< 80.000).

When Steven was ending his presentation he announced that every attendee will receive this excellent laptop.

The second part of the Keynote was driven by ScottGu’s . Scott announced Silverlight 4 and showed some cool stuff like leveraging the webcam and microphone, the CLR now enables the same compiled code to be run on the desktop and Silverlight without change, all the complete list of enhancements can be found here.

Then I went to see Scott Hanselman’s presentation named “ASP.NET MVC 2: Ninjas Still on Fire Black Belt Tips“,I know I’m not discovering anything new, but he is really a great presenter, I really enjoyed his presentation.

After lunch we went to the Partners Hall to see the Windows Azure Container and we met ScottGu, below you will see some evidence

Tomorrow is the last day of this great conference, it will finish near 4 pm. See you tomorrow.

Hi folks

Today it was a great day at PDC. At 8 a.m we were in the line ready to enter to the main hall to attend the Keynote. Today’s Keynote was driven by Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia. The focus was Azure new features like the appFabric and the possibility of uploading customized virtual machines (coming soon) among others.

Another topic that was announced is the “Sidney” project, that basically connects an on premises server with the cloud.

Then came the time for the demos, Cameron Skinner showed Tailspin Travel this demo was aimed to cover Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 new features. Pablo Costantini was part of the team that built it.

Many companies presented success cases about their products hosted on Windows Azure like, WordPress, Domino Pizza, Siemens IT Services, Kelley Blue Book and Coca Cola.

After the break I went to see Don Box and Chris Anderson on stage, what a great duo they make. The session was call “Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer”. They talked about Entity Framework new features and they announced a new data protocol called “OData”. Then they also announced a new project called “M”, it’s a data modeling language that you use to create DSLs to express your data.

You can also check Johnny’s and Tim’s post for more information.

See you tomorrow

Finally time arrived, I was really anxious to be here. Today workshops took place and tomorrow will be the time for the sessions.

If you are staying in a “PDC hotel”, you can take a bus that will leave you inside the Convention Center.

The registration started at 8 AM, there are 2 registrations areas, one for MSFT employees and another one for mortals .

Once registered, you receive a bag with notebooks, pens, magazines and a plastic water bottle.

You have a coffee area, with a Starbucks store inside, also you have coffee available in every room. You can also find lot of places with AC power plugs, this  a great idea taking into consideration that many of us came with laptop, photo camera and video camera.

Once I registered I met old friends from Merrill Lynch and then attended to the Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp.

The first talk was about Windows 7 kernel enhancements, like memory management, security, NUMA nodes, scalability, power consumption, footprint, parallelism and new technologies related to hardware and software.

The speakers: Mark Russinovich, Landy Wang and Arun Kishan

Then after the lunch I attended to the Windows 7 Sensors and Location API session, they showed really cool demos with external light and motion sensor sensors. One of those demos was a racing game that depending on the light the color of the sky changes, it was really cool.

Tomorrow will take place the Key Note where the demo that Southworks built will be shown, and then I will attend “Data Programming and Modeling for the Microsoft .NET Developer” presented by Don Box and in the afternoon I will attend “Overview of SharePoint 2010 Programmability”.

Stay tuned and see you tomorrow

This is my first time in LA. The people is great, there are very nice buildings and the weather is helping my walks.

Today I walked around the east side of the city and couldn’t avoid going to check if everything was going ok.. fellows don’t worry, everything is on schedule

Stay tuned.

Next Wednesday I’m flying to Los Angeles to attend the PDC 2009. The event is held in Los Angeles Convention Center.
The PDC is the event focused on the technical strategy of the Microsoft developer platform.
During the last couple of months at Southworks we have been creating several demos and content like Hand On Labs that are going to be shown at the conference.

I will meet several Southies that will attend the conference too: Ale Jack, Tim, Matias, Johnny and PC.
My plan is to write blog posts summarizing the conferences I will attend, so stay tuned, more post and news coming soon.

Thanks Southworks and specially Johnny "Interop" Halife for this opportunity