Managed World

While I found this talk interesting, it was a little off base. What it should have been titled was "New Debugging Features in Visual Studio 2005 for Managed Languages." What makes this especially funny for me is that a couple of things happened:

1) The talk started 10 minutes late

2) At the beginning of the talk, he asked how many C# developers there were and only six or seven of us raised our hands (there are maybe 40-50 developers in the room).

3) Knowing that only 10% of us are Managed developers, he then goes on to talk about writing new visualizers and the like (which is NOT available for native C++ developers (as I understand it)). That seemed a bit weird to me. If you're not going to use the information at all, why ask the question (especially when it can negate the purpose of your whole talk)?

Anyways, yeah, I've seen all this stuff at Tech Ed so nothing new here for me. I was hoping it would be a lot lower level since this is largely a development-oriented conference and most of the developers (at least it seems) are C++ developers. Oh well, c'est la vie!

Interesting. All power point reading, but interesting nonetheless. I just hope there is some "meat" to some of these talks rather than just power point, power point, and more power point. I must take this opportunity to say that after seeing Scott Hanselman talk so many times, I'm an absolute spoiled brat when it comes to presentations. I find that I'm very picky about good presentations and certain things (like power point reading) annoy me greatly. At least there's some content here though.

One thing I find especially interesting is how specialized DirectX is becoming. What I mean by that is how many DirectX elements are becoming deprecated. From the sounds of it, DirectX is basically being wittled down to Direct3D and DirectSound. Here are the state of the other APIs that I know of:

1) DirectDraw - Deprecated

2) DirectMusic - Deprecated

3) DirectPlay - Deprecated

4) DirectShow - Not recommended for game development

5) DirectInput - Although it is not officially deprecated, it is highly recommended to simply use the Windows hooks instead of DirectInput.

I have a feeling there will be many interesting issues I will see in the next day or two regarding the direction that DirectX is heading.

Well, um, yeah, the keynote.... What can I say? Hrm. It was by Mike Morhaime who is a co-founder of Blizzard. And, I may be crazy here, but I would think that if you are a co-founder of Blizzard you would have SOME sort of public speaking skill. I guess I was wrong. Funny how that works. He read to us about the lessons learned (by his employees evidently) during the global launch of World of Warcraft.

However, I did walk away with two distinct impressions from the keynote:

1) He did not write the speech himself

2) It was most likely the first time he ever read the speech.

And I thought some of the talks at Tech Ed were bad. I suppose in hindsight, they weren't *that* bad. At least they were "power point" readings instead of "index card" readings.

And what's up with a computer guy not knowing about laptops? He was quite confused because when he closed the lid, the computer would go in to Stand By mode and the powerpoint slides would disappear. Well, yeah, what would you expect to happen?

I'm strongly hoping that it isn't a sign to how the rest of the talks are going to go. But judging by the names giving the talks, I have a good feeling that the talks will be reasonably high quality.

Well, tonight was the pre-Meltdown hang. Before the hang actually started, Andy Dunn called me up and we decided to walk over and check out the Seattle Public Library whose architecture is talked about widely, evidently. All I could think of was "what a funny looking building." However, it really is incredible. Starting on like the 4th floor, all the books are on a "spiral" where there really isn't any "floors" per se. It's basically one continuous spiral up many floors. Pretty trippy to see that. Anyways, after that we hiked back to the hotel.

The hang was fun. Free drinks and food. Had a good time with Andy, Chris, Jessica, and Todd. It was great after a couple of beers to get Andy talking about us speaking "American" and him actually talking English, and about the fact that *WE* are the ones with the accents (after all, *THEY* are English and it is their language). And then I knew something that would REALLY get him started. So I bated him by saying that what is really messed up is how Football is not Football. OHHHHHHH, good times.

He said something at one point that was pretty darn crazy. I mentioned I was going to blog about it and everyone started laughing. Luckily for Andy, I have a REALLY bad memory and can't even remember what it was (if you're reading this Chris and can remember what it was, make sure to leave a comment).

OH, and Chris was recognized by the ladies heading up the door to the bar. Pretty crazy. He's all famous and crap because of the stuff he went through to get here. JEALOUS.

I'm really excited about Meltdown starting tomorrow. Here is the rundown of the sessions I will be attending over the next two days:

Tuesday

- Best Practices for Windows Development

- Optimizing Windows Games

- The Effects Framework for DirectX 9: Best Practices & Optimizations

- Performance Investigator for Windows (PIX)

- Debugging Tips and Techniques for C#/C++ Developers

- Peer to Peer Connectivity and Communications

- Flight Simulator: Preparing for DirectX 10

Wednesday

- Advanced Lighting Techniques

- Managed and Native Code for Tools Development

- Application Compatibility Testing and Automation using PIX for Windows

- Next-Gen Graphics on Longhorn Revealed, Part 1 (yes, I know it's now "Vista")

- Next-Gen Graphics on Longhorn Revealed, Part 2

- Next-Gen Effects on DirectX

- Direct3D Futures

I can't wait. Well, goodnight!!