Sessions and First Impressions

I arrived at the conference after a one-mile hike thru downtown LA around 10am. I must admit, the convention center is huge and packed. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say there's around 5000-7000 people here for PDC. There's always a lot of hustle and bustle around here. But I have noticed that the people at the conference aren't nearly as socialable as at Real World. But no one's mugged me, so I'm doing fine. :-P

The first thing I attended was a series of keynotes. Unfortunately, I missed the one put on by Bill Gates -- I was more interested in attending a session on the WinFX SDK. Unfortunately, that session was cancelled (to be rescheduled) due to the keynote taking way too long. I think it went almost an hour over schedule.

There wasn't too much new information at the keynote for me, but that was mostly because I've been using Vista quite regularly. They did show some cool new things that I didn't know about before though, such as instant previews for things like font menus and print previews. I also saw a lot of new Office 12 functionality that I think would make for some awesome additions to the Office automation stuff we already support. The new Office looks really nice in that they simplified the UI a bunch. For example, in Excel, you're only shown toolbar items for the current context. Click on a cell, you get cell operations. Click on a table, you get table operations. This lets them focus the UI on the task at hand, and it exposes a lot of functionality that I never knew existed. For instance, you can select a column of data and have it inline chart data (right in the selected cells, not in a separate chart object). I was quite impressed, which is hard to do since I still use Office 2000.

After the keynotes, I sat in a room waiting to be briefed on how the WinFX SDK is laid out. But as I said before, that was cancelled due to people talking too long at the keynotes. So I took the opportunity to go hang out in the various tech lounges. It's really nice -- they have part of a (huge) room set aside with tables, chairs, couches, etc and there's a banner near each section that designates what's there. Then they have Microsoft employees signed up for time slots to hang out there and answer questions.

I went and tracked down Lee Holmes and had a nice discussion and quick demo of Monad -- the new Windows command line shell. It's damn nice. DAMN NICE. It's a fully object-oriented command line shell. So I can say "dir" to get a directory listing, or "dir[0]" to get the first item from the directory list, or "dir[0].Comments" to get the user comments on the first item in the directory listing. To make it even more cool, they went away from the horrible use of regex (yay, no grep!) and you can now use SQL commands in the shell. So if I wanted to find a process named notepad, I could do "get-process where < $ProcessName> like "notepad"" and it would return just those listings. I am very excited for Monad. Lee gave me a download link for a beta of it, so I plan on installig it and playing around with it.

Then I hunted down Thomas Logan, because I wasn't able to find Sarah Ford. Thomas is the program manager for the Accessibility department at Microsoft. He answered a bunch of questions I had about MS Active Accssibility (MSAA). He also gave me some contact information if I had any more in-depth questions and said that he'd be happy to get me some resources for making REALbasic more accessible. He was very excited to hear that I am an evangelist within the company for accessibility issues, and was very helpful.

After hanging out in the lounge (and getting some cool new swag), it was time to go see the "Getting users to fall in love with your software" session. It was basically a session that detailed good UI design. It focused a lot on the main tradeoffs when designing software. Things like power vs simplicity, automatic vs manual, etc. It was a good talk, and the presenter was an awesome speaker. One of the things that I found quite interesting was his statement that reliability is the number one most important aspect of your software -- not features. I guess I always have known this deep down, but after seeing how many pieces of software in the world that are unreliable, I guess I wondered if I was the odd-man-out. Another good point, which I wholeheartedly agree with is that contextual menus are not the devil, but they are all-or-none. Mice devote almost half of their UI to the right mouse button, so there's absolutely no reason to shun it. It's there, it's useful, embrace it. However, if you start putting in contextual menus, make sure that they're all over the place so that the user who likes using them can count on them being there.

Then I sat thru a talk about the new P2P functionality in Vista (provided by Indigo). It was a rather boring talk, but I learned a few interesting facts to go check into. It looks like there are some unmanaged APIs to very easily support discovery services on the system. The managed APIs gave me quite a few good ideas for networking toys, but we need introspection before I can truly be creative with them.

Then I headed back to the lounge, and found my personal hero, Raymond Chen. He was much more friendly than I had figured. After hearing him described as having the personality of a thermonuclear device, I was figuring he'd be unapproachable. But he's actually very affable, with a great sense of humor and a strong willingness to help. I certainly wasn't disappointed as he answered a handful of wide ranging questions of mine. It was a great experience, and I'm glad I hunted for him.

Because of my chat with Raymond though, I missed the presentation about Avalon. However, I'm not too worried, since I found that I have direct access to Avalon engineers in the tech lounge. They've been answering random questions of mine all day long. :-)

I'm about to make the hike back to my hotel since the sessions are done for the day. But my first impressions of the conference have all been quite good. There's a ton of information flowing around here, so I feel right at home. However, my brain is full, so I hope to empty it tonight with some beer.

More later, and feel free to ask questions!