Yesterday was the first PDC05 Show Off ever.

The idea of the event was to show cool, interesting and/or funny videos submitted by people in advance. The maximum time for each video was 5 minutes. You can read more about the idea from Michael Swanson’s blog.

There were some really cool videos that will be available from Channel 9 in case you didn’t make it to the PDC or the Show Off. My favorite ones were the Tablet PC based labyrinth game, the funny video about internals of .NET (by Microsoft Sweden) and many others.

As I expected, the spirit of in the event was strong and everybody cheered after or even during the videos, if they were especially cool. The PDC Show Off reminded me very much of some small demo parties, where people gather to show their cool and advanced programming skills. I’m sure that in the future we’ll see some WPF-based (Avalon) demos that’ll try to take advantage of all the power of the Windows Vista platform for cool visual effects.

I enjoyed the event very much and will attend it at the next PDC, too. Who knows, maybe I’ll contribute with some video, too. That is, if I come up with some cool enough idea by then

Lot’s of new information, again! I’ll just write a short summary here and then split each highlight into individual posts. That way it’ll be easier to refer to in the future.

The second keynote introduced many new technologies and products around .NET and Office 12.

Highlights were:

• Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF?)
• Expression family for designers:
• Acrylic (the drawing program that exports XAML)
• Quartz (The really cool XHTML/CSS/ASP.NET/XML/XSL designer)
• Spark (The tool for creating animations and effects)
• Visual Studio for Applications (VSTA)
• Windows SharePoint Services v.3
• InfoPath 12
• Office Server –products (like Excel)

 Other cool things:

• All PDC attendees will receive a free SQL Server 2005, when it ships!
• All PDC-attendees will get access to Office 12 Beta 1 (via BetaPlace), when it is ready
• And that’s not all! First 100 that submit Watson bug-reports, will receive Office Steak Knives! :)

I’ll submit my thoughts and notes about the highlights mentioned above as soon as I have the time to write them.

Last sessions of the Tuesday for me were:

Choosing the Right Presentation Technology: Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon"), Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE, and More.

and

A Lap Around IIS7.

The title says it all about the contents of the first presentation: It compared the ups and downs of each presentation layer technology and had some demos around ASP.NET’s Atlas, WPF/E and WPF -applications.

WPF/E (“Everywhere”) was mentioned briefly at the keynote, but its practical usage was left bit hazy. This session told more about this lightweight version of the WPF, which consists primarily of XAML and DHTML (instead of XAML and C#, for example). Long story short, they showed how an Avalon application worked in OS X’s Safari-browser! How cool is that? :)

Finally there was the presentation about IIS7. Contents were more or less quite similar to the Channel 9’s interview, but still it was very interesting session.

The IIS7 is truly componentized (even more so than IIS6) and practically everything you don’t need can be disabled or replaced with your own modules.

Don’t need authentication or directory browser? Just disable them from the web.config or the completely rewritten UI. Oh, and the IIS7 doesn't need to be restarted when modifying the modules.

Some other highlights from the IIS7-session included:

• Configuration settings for ASP.NET, IIS7 and WCF (Indigo) can be set in the same file.
• In one demo he showed how to replace standard directory browser with his own module that rendered image files into an image browser or RSS-feeds with the help of simple HTTP-handlers.
• PHP worked in one demo simply just by attaching the ISAPI-module that comes with the engine to the IIS7.

After the sessions were over, I spent some time in the exhibition hall collecting some goodies and t-shirts (this is how geeks get their clothes). Then was the time for the PDC Underground, where the best thing was discovering this site: http://www.GotCodeSnippets.net/.

Ok, the keynote and first session are now over. Here are some of my thoughts:

The keynote was a bit too long, but there were many interesting things, like revealing the Office 12 and the many coding demos in the end. Screenshots and other information about those are now all over the Internet. Visit Neowin.net and OSnews.com for links and discussions.

One funny thing about the keynote was the real-time subtitling. The typist kept up with the speakers well, but some of the technical terms proved to be quite hard to him/her. Here are some of the funny ones translated:

• 30 giga bites (bytes [of Goodies])
• RSF feeds (RSS feeds)
• Fishing (Phising)
• Dying Gram (Diagram)
• E-max (Emacs)
• Korne Rite Line (Console.WriteLine)
• HT IT P (HTTP)
• ESP.NET (ASP.NET). Probably some new Windows Telepathy Foundation…. ;)

Windows application developers should check out the full-blown WinFX –application for sharing photos as slideshows with friends: Max. It is a very good example, what Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) –based apps will look like and feel.

Another thing you should check out, if you are a web developer: Community Preview version of the Atlas. With a little javascript and/or server-side controls (<atlas:listview>, for example) you’ll be able to add cross-browser AJAX-functionality to your web app easily. There is even an AJAX-control for Virtual Earth right in the toolbox!

Other demos told about the Language Integrated Query Framework (LINQ), which allows you to query objects, databases and xml. Syntax is very similar to SQL, so it should be relatively easy to learn. Not many details yet (like how connection strings, stored procedures etc are used with it, but we’ll see), but it seemed really interesting and will make developing the data layers much more versatile in the future (.NET 3.0). Nothing concrete about the new workflow services yet. That has to wait until Wednesday.

After the keynote and lunch, I went to listen to the Hillel Cooperman’s presentation, Getting users to fall in love with your software. It was quite nice presentation and had some good usability tips.

The following morning I went for a breakfast and met some other Finnish guys that are on the same EMEA@PDC-tour. We agreed to rent a car and drive around a bit. I was assigned to be the map reader and still we didn’t get lost!

The LA Convention Center

Our first stop was the LA Convention Center, where the PDC is held this year, also. Even though there wasn’t much to see yet, we thought it would be a good idea to register in advance to avoid the rush on the opening day. We got our badges and bags and t-shirts and then after meeting some another friends, we continued with our sightseeing.

Beaches

Our second waypoint was the Santa Monica beach. It was... well, a beach. Sun was shining and everything was like in the Baywatch, except for the life guards etc ;) We walked along the beach (dressed more or less appropriately) and took pictures and video. We went to the Santa Monica Pier and back and that’s about it.

Then we drove towards the Venice and Venice Beach, but decided not to go there, as it wouldn’t have been that different and our time was limited.

The Six Flags amusement park

After the beaches it was the time for some action. We drove to the Six Flags –amusement park, which is filled with great roller coasters among other attractions. We went to few ones and the Déjàvu was everybody’s favorite. The only sad thing is, that it will be hard to find as exciting rides in the future.

Then we had to leave to make it on time for a supper with a Microsoft’s Aali and other great persons from the Finnish developer community.