Start PDC05 Day 3
I hopped on the bus about 7:30, heading over to the convention center for the Canadian attendee breakfast. Mark Relph, who organized the gathering, was on the same bus and he mentioned that just moments earlier he had been sitting in the lobby of our hotel when Jennifer Garner (the future Mrs. Rob Windsor) walked thru. We knew that someone had been filming here for the last couple days it turns out it was the TV show Alias.
We had a smaller than expected group at the breakfast, only two tables full. It turns out that about half the people went to the other side of the dining hall, couldn’t see us or the flag, and decided to have their own little gathering there.
After breakfast I caught a little bit of the keynote on the upcoming server technology. While this technology is something that will affect my work in the future it’s not something I work with directly or find particularly interesting so the only observation I can make is that the speaker, Bob Muglia, reminded me of George Bush.
After the keynote it was off to the session I was most looking forward to, Paul Vick talking about Visual Basic language futures. Paul discussed how VB will expose the new LINQ features of the framework as well as how it will add extensions to make these features even easier to use. For example VB will fully support XML syntax, meaning you will be able write XML directly in your source code. Here’s an example:
Dim customer = _
<Customer id=”6” name=”Rob”>
<Address city=”Toronto” />
<Invoices>
<%= GetInvoiceItems(custId) %>
</Invoices>
</Customer>
Note the ASP like syntax to call the GetInvoiceItems method to populate the invoices in the document. Paul talked about a bunch of other features the details of which you can read at There was a bunch more which you can read at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future.
The other talk I sat in on was also Visual Basic related, it was supposed to be on extending the My namespace but I have no idea what the actual topic was. There was some stuff on using My, some stuff on editing config files, some stuff on trapping unhandled exceptions but nothing on extending My (at least before I bailed on the session). It was too bad because extending My is something that will be useful in the Whidbey timeframe as well as beyond.
I spent the mid-afternoon hanging round the Big Room doing some networking and then headed back to hotel to pack and have a shower. There was a Canadian (plus Julie Lerman – who is a honorary Canadian) get-together in the hotel sports bar at 6:30 followed by dinner at my favorite restaurant in the world, Morton’s. Several drinks, a monster shrimp cocktail, and a perfectly cooked Porterhouse later I headed back to the hotel and crashed.
End PDC05 Day 3