Another day, another million things to learn about.
I started the day off with a very difficult decision: whether to listen to Paul Vick (the creator of VB) talk about future language directions of VB.NET, or listen to Raymond Chen talk about 5 things every Win32 developer should know. Raymond won the contest, and I wasn't disappointed. I learned a bunch of neat things to watch out for (such as memory locality -- a concept I was aware of, but needed a good reminder as to why it's so important). I also learned that there's a new API in Vista called IWinsat which will let a developer determine the level of features on a machine. So if I see that your machine is really quite slow, I may choose to disable an eye-candy feature because your machine just can't handle it. So I'm not stuck penalizing users with quality machines, and I can still support the baseline.
After Raymond's talk, I listened to a discussion of how to use Microsoft's Error Reporting services to better serve customers. I'm *very* excited by the things I learned while there. I've known for some time that there's a free service you can sign up for to get crash dumps for your applications from Microsoft (ya know, the send more information to Microsoft button?). What I didn't know was that they're improving the entire system so that I can recover from errors (both documents and restarting the app) as well as attach extra information to the file. It's going to be awesome! Surprisingly, it was one of the most informative sessions I've been at.
I took a lunch break at that point and wandered around asking various geek questions to Microsoft techs in the lounge. Did you know that font linking (what Mac people refer to as font substitution) has been in Windows since Win2k, and is an automatic feature? I never knew that! I also got a few nagging questions answered about the CLR and what desktops are supposed to be used for. I also got an autographed business card from Raymond Chen. :-)
After the break, I went to a talk about what sort of new kernel improvements are in Vista. In terms of things that I think are a good deal, Microsoft has finally realized that services needed some new configuration options. You see, traditionally, services can either be automatically launched at boot time, or manually launched by a client. Now, in Vista, there's a new way of launching a service -- delayed-automatic launching. The service is launched automatically, but it may not be at boot time. So the boot time of the system is improved because services can be flagged to launch at the system's leisure. So it's not really innovative, but it's much-needed. There were some other interesting things that have changed in the system, such as a transactional registry and file system, that I was impressed with as well. It was an interesting session to hang out in.
This ended up being my last session of the day -- I skipped the one I had planned to go to so that I could discuss code security, .NET technology and the CLR with Shawn Farkas. It was an enjoyable conversation that lasted about an hour. I also had the chance to meet with Sarah Ford and thank her for her work in the accessibility field. As with every Microsoft employee I've spoken with, it was a very nice conversation. I must admit, everyone has been extremely helpful and enthusiastic. It makes the conference that much more valuable and enjoyable.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference -- and it's only a half day worth of sessions. It's going to be sad to have to leave when there's so much more for me to learn. But then again, my brain is rather full. :-P
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