Day 2 started with the Keynote focussed around the Windows Workflow Foundation. As I’m much better with bullet lists than writing lots of padding text, here’s the pieces I took away from it:<\/p>\n
Following the keynote I attended a session on VSTA, given that my work uses VBA in a fairly large amount of applications. It honestly wasn’t that useful for me – basically it was from the user of VSTA and not a person who wanted to put VSTA into their application. The only really useful thing for me was to find that the SDK will be available sometime in the first half of next year.<\/p>\n
Over lunch, I turned up to a quick session on how to improve .NET application performance with .NET 2.0 and came away with:<\/p>\n
After lunch, I went to the Vista graphics sessions (with a small interruption I won’t mention where I failed to find some collegues). Fundamentally, Vista is a very graphics rich and intensive platform and the sessions were a really good look into what we can expect from our systems next year. First up, the high level Vista graphics:<\/p>\n
That session was immediately followed by the DirectX sessions, which gave me the following:<\/p>\n
As you can see, DirectX 10 looks very interesting but given the complete shift in GPU technology required I don’t expect to see many broad applications for at least 18–24 months. Games may take some advantage of it, but until they are guaranteed a DX10 GPU they’ll have to have multiple code paths (yay, more) which deal with “downlevel” versions of GPUs. In any case, I’m definitely interested enough to be looking at buying the hardware when it comes out, which will be in the same timeframe as Windows Vista, at least according to the presenter.<\/p>\n
Once the sessions were done, I headed out to Universal Studios<\/a> for the PDC party. Part of the really cool thing about going to Universal was I have a friend who works there as a technical coordinator (I think that’s the right word) for the Fear Factor<\/a> and Waterworld<\/a> shows. As a result I was able to get to talk with the crew and cast and had a really good time looking over the “backstage” aspects of each show. After the shows, we headed out to a great bar near Universal (Howl at the Moon<\/a>) which had one of the best bar bands I’d seen taking requests for 80s songs and just playing them. Hard to argue with 2 grand pianos back to back, bass, lead guitar, drims, saxophone and lead singer who all manage to ad lib and improvise together to put their own twists on tunes the *crowd* was picking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Day 2 started with the Keynote focussed around the Windows Workflow Foundation. As I’m much better with bullet lists than writing lots of padding text, here’s the pieces I took away from it: Microsoft Expression Suite will be composed of the three projects named “Acrylic”, “Sparkle” and “Quartz”. Acrylic is a combination vector\/bitmap editing program which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}