A meeting of all pdc bloggers will take place at the a party in Universal studios. I got this from Scott hanselman's blog :

PDC - ATTENTION ALL BLOGGERS! MEETING AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS TONIGHT!

Yo!  There's a meeting at the Hollywood Grill inside of Universal Studios tonight at 8PM!  Check out the map of Universal.  We'll be meeting at #19 on the map, close to the entrance.  Pass it on!

10/29/2003 11:06:32 PM UTC     

   I am telling you, don't you ever think that avalon, or WinFS is the big thing happening at pdc ... I don't want to discuss Yukon at this time of the night, but the big thing here is : INDIGO ... the blue and quiet new communication layer, that really ends the reign of COM, and of the objects everywhere model as well.

   Well, I saw the light (metaphorically off course, for this same light has been with me for many years now), and it was coming from Don Box's speech on Indigo. I don't use session or presentation, because it was a speech, full of enlightening thoughts, and it was a session of evangelization if I ever saw one.

   What object is about, what messages are about, what the value of message based architectures is (SOA- service oriented architecture if you prefer to call it so), and how SOA actually works  ... thank you Don.

   What amzes me is that so many people understood the value of the talk ... or at least so many of them where there, until there was no more free chairs, no more empty space on the floor, and the corridor was no longer walkable ... great job Don.

   The thing about don Box as an MSFT employee is that he has much less freedom to express his opinions in his natural words for them, but he found a way to speak them differently ... Keep going Don ...

   Then, when it is all about SOA, and the only speaker in this pdc that is clearly speaking the extent and value of it is Don ... Hail Don, Hurray ...

10/29/2003 9:34:16 AM UTC     

   Do you know what the .Net Rocks is ? if you don't, click on this link quickly ....

   Well, imagine a .Net Rocks show, right from a session room in the LA Convention Center, during the very first day of pdc (actually on pre-conference day), with a panel made of an amazing selection of RDs, and with great Xbox gifts for attendees ...

   How ? just put an attendee on the alley, give him the microphone, and make him guess whether the nswer given by the RD is true or false.

   I never realized how fun many very serious RDs can be until today ... What are Web Services ? Michelle Leroux Bustamente would say : "it's like Teen Sex, those who talk about about it don't do it and those doing it don't talk about it"... "what the most significant difference between interop in C# qnd in C++", Kate Gregory would say that it is in the way you do DllImports!!!". How deo you access pivate members of a class? I don't remeber scott hanselmans exact wording, but it goes like " you buy him a drink...",  off course, it end up with th RD giving the right answer (except a couple times), and the attendee going home very happy.

   I'll be posting some pictures of the show and of the panel when I get those pictures printed and scanned (well, I use my smart phone for many things including my agenda and emails, I use almost no paper, but I still love using my Canon Eos camera with lenses and zoom covering a 35-210 mm focal distance... call me traditional or outdated on that, I don't mind at all)

   if you have been at a pre-conference day before, you know you dont have the feeling that the conference is there ... well, carl just made it happen ...

   thank you carl.

10/27/2003 10:42:23 AM UTC     

Being on a "Microsoft Flight", as strange as it might seem, or, for corectness sake, let's say a European avaiation "microsoft Developer circle" charter flight, has been quite an experience ...

In London, it was an algorithmic challenge to find out what gate the plane was boarded on ... later, it was a guy hunging on the reactor, and the guy just fell down (I didn't see it, but all the spanish guys around me where talking about it, and assuring me it did happen) ... luckly, he didn't seem to hve endured any injuries ...

One hour too late, we where boarding the plane.  well, we borded, but that does'nt mean we departed ...

One more hour, and the plane took off ...

Even if the plane was far from being on time, it did deliver, at least on the first part of the flight, the promise of being a microsoft thing ... the very first movie showing (its an eleven hour flight), was the .net Show covering Direct-X managed ...

All of the movies that followed, even though they were regular movies, they were cartoonish/alien stuf ... which reminded me of that slide I usuallly use with young developers (academia, certain customers) that states, with no ambiguity, that the main influence of developers is StartTrek ... which slide I borrowed from my friend Sidi Ali Maalainein (Microsost North Africa-TS Team) .... I just hope there were some impressionable people on the flight ...

Another totally unordinary thing was the meeting room in the front of the plane ...

Once in LA, thee was of course the very serious immagration finger print and photo taking ... which will be compared to the finger print and photo when departing ... just to make sure my finger has not changed its print during the pdc ... Really makes you feel more secure ...

Then, LA ... it's LA with its high suckiness potential (The level of suckiness is a new standard by the anti-suckiness commission, finalized in hammamet, Tunisia on last June 25 ... it is based on measures of suckiness taken by three major independent source, ie: clemens, steven, goksin and I ... Well, I don't have clemens' and stev's measurement, but for myself, it is strange, but the level of suckniness is keeping quite low ... Great Hotel, huge room, nice drinks and food, and it is warmer than Casablanca ...

10/26/2003 9:10:33 AM UTC     

   Some time ago, I swore never to format or parse anything anymore ... Well, usually one really doesn't have to, since there are often higher layers for most protocols. However, I have made an even stronger oath never to copy somebody else's code without either going through every detail of it, making it maintainable (comments and structure), and testing it to a fair level of confidence, before using it in a project (off course I'm talking about non copyrighted code).

   Well, I have not had to integrate email in my applications beyond the functionality of System.Web.Mail classes. Until today, when I had to do some authentified smtp mail sending, and some pop3/imap mail retrieval. I must confess I started by looking at some user samples and source code in the regular sites (http://www.gotdotnet.com , codeproject ...etc), and did find some intersting classes, except that they just did not satisfy my maintainability criteria, and would have taken me more time to arrange than just plain rewriting the code.

   Here I am thus, about a half day later, with a functional smtp client class (that replaces somewhat the smtpMail class of System.Web.Mail, and is able to do authentication using Base64 Encoded username and password, and send a System.Web.Mail.MailMessage object. I have not finished doing the necessary parsing for the pop3 retireved messages (I will have to postpone that until wednesday because of the many engagements I have tomorrow...)

   Attached is the code to my smtpManager Class.

10/20/2003 8:34:13 PM UTC     

   Jeff Sandquist  has sent me a bdc bloggers T-Shirt. It has "I'm blogging this" on the front, and a nice "Microsoft PDC03 I was there" logo on the back. Thanks Jeff.

   I guess this will give some visibility to bloggers among attendees ... too bad the pdcbloggers Url is not on the shirt ...

   One of my collaborators at the office just made me realize I have been receiving so many     T-Shirts that I just don't buy clothing anymore ... Thanks a lot everyone ...

10/20/2003 10:53:55 AM UTC     

If you see this logo on someone at PDC, he is one of the many RDs attending (I would guess there should be around 70 or 80 of us), speaking, participating in a panel, hosting BOF sessions, monitoring the labs, doing Ask the Experts booth duties... outside the conference center, more probably than not around sunset or holywood boulevard at night, you can find many of us (without the badges this time) ...

Who are we ? you can look us up at our web site at http://www.microsoftregionaldirectors.com/Public/ .

We are about 120 independent developers, architects, trainers, consultants and other professionals from all around the world, very informed about Microsoft technologies (usually also about other thecnologies as well). We usually can give you informed opinions, based on real world experience and balaced views about Microsoft technologies away from hype or dog food.

See you there ...

10/15/2003 1:43:37 PM UTC     

This year, not only PDC is great in including three huge new technologies, but also in its special sessions. One of the new formats is the Birds Of a Feather sessions. These are attendee hosted (any attendee can propose a session, and the sessions are aproved based on a vote by attendees).

The format of these sessions is really interesting, because it is a one hour, almost unstructured (close to chalk talk format) discussions between attendees. My guess is that we will see lots of humor take place, and much less dog food than we would in any other sessions.

Looking at the aproved topics, it is interesting to see that they globally three kinds :

1. Real Life experience and concerns with .Net (present and future). These really are concerned by the topics that are not technology topics, and that one would never expect or trust Microsofties to cover.
2. Alternate or deeper looks at technologies than one would not expect in regular sessions. These cover things like Rotor (CLI) development, using .Net with Oracle, Alternate programming languages, business intelligence with .Net, Palldium ...etc.
3. Totally non technical, usally very different approche to developer concerns, like Women who code (I don't hide I will not miss that one, since most women attendees will be there ...), Reader to Author to Publisher for .NET (books on .Net), Weblogging: The Future of Conversational Software ...etc.

I will be hosting a BOF on Office system and integrating with business process (I just noticed my topic was aproved!). See you there ...

10/15/2003 12:56:57 PM UTC     

The PDC Panels are great in that is has no prepared marketing dog food (no PPTs allowed). It is about Microsofties answering your technical questions. PDC bloggers will cover the various panels, and gives you even an opportunity to ask your questions before hand (even if you are not a PDC attendee).

I will be covering two panels :

1. Put The Power Inside: Hosting the CLR in Your Application - 10:30:00 AM - Room501ABC

2. Computing on the Beach: Visions of Mobility - 1:45 PM - Room 411-Theater

All panels are on the PDC's last day (Thursday Oct 30).

10/15/2003 11:48:56 AM UTC     

   Last PDC was in LA. If it was not one of the greatest, and if there was no PDC in 2002, it is because a PDC is and should be about technology, and there were no totally new one at the time ... This year, not only there is a new technology, there are many of them (Indigo, Longhorn, Yukon, ...).

   The number of attendees also seems to be one of the greatest (already overbooked, and registration closing on Monday, hurry up if you haven't registered yet!). I go to many conferences regularly (at least 3-4 per year in the US, many events in my region - i.e. North Africa), and I always come bqack with the opinion that what makes a conference great is both its content and the general atmosphere, parties and fun going on in it. This PDC will be a blast ... See you there.

10/11/2003 4:22:17 PM UTC