Ah... what a hectic week.

Every day was busy. I become completely adicted to the track lounge, and spent probably 6 or 8 hours a day in the lounge. In the evenings there were conference events, dinners, and (one) party to go to. I find the PDC to be so energizing - getting to see customers, talk about what they are doing, and answer questions about our technology. It really gets me juiced about shipping.

I ended up heading over to Vegas right after my session on Friday. We flew in, hoped in a limo (cheaper than a couple cabs when you have too many people), and stayed at the Paris for one night. It was a blast. I love Vegas - but only in short bursts.

We had dinner at a fabulous steak place called "Craft Steak". We did the dinner Hillel-style, which amounts to everything being family style; soups, steaks, deserts, etc. It was absolutely awesome. The most expensive meal I've ever eaten, but really great.

I kept a somewhat reasonable schedule, turning in around 1:30am, and then we headed to the airport around 11:30. Of course there was a mandatory stop at In-N-Out Burgers before we got to the airport.

The checkin line was long, but when I checked in I figure I'd try to get on Alaska's last minute first class upgrade ($50 bucks to get a first class seat on these short runs like Vegas to Seattle!). Happily there was 1 seat in first left, so I snatched it up. Here are McCarran Airport they have a special security line for first class passengers, so I'm already finding my $50 well spent! McCarran has free wireless also, so even though I don't have a cell phone, I can still communicate.

You know your in trouble when your wife complains about you on her blog :)

Yes, I did "fall" in a pool. Yes, I did destroy my phone. No, I didn't do it on purpose.

Just a reminder to everyone - The Visual Studio 2005 RC that was given to PDC attendees and is available for download is *NOT* compatible with the WinFX PDC CTP bits that were handed out... WinFX CTPs are still running on Visual Studio Beta 2. PDC attendees got a copy of these bits in "The Goods", and anyone else can download the Beta from MSDN.

... and for clarification, yes, "WPF" is pronounced "Avalon"... the WPF is silent.

Just finished the lap, had some great Tacitos (sp?) with Don, Scott, and Dharma. Personally I didn't hear anything funny about what Don said... but, you can make up your own mind.

Anyway, heading back to the venue, hope everyone enjoyed the keynotes!

In about 12 minutes my ride is showing up to take me to the airport. On Friday I worked until about midnight on my demo that is part of Jim Allchin's keynote. Last PDC Don & I did the whole "Lap Around Longhorn" thing, and this year we set out to try and out do it... we have a lot more content, but actually a bit less time. It's hard to boil things down to be short enough, but still get the key messages across. In addition, we are having a couple extra people part of the song and dance, which makes everything a bit more "fun"!

This PDC is going to be amazing. I can't wait to get updated bits in their hands, see people's reactions to the new C# and VB features around query, and everything else we are announcing (Day 2 of the PDC will be AWESOME!).

I'm a little frustrated that we weren't able to deliver all the bits that I wanted to, but they will get out as soon as they are ready. All the teams involved with developers (Visual Studio, WinFX, Vista) have really embraced the CTP notion, which means we should be able to get real working bits to the customers sooner.

Sorry for the long delay in posting, but it's been *way* too much fun after coming back from Italy to get everything together for my talk and the keynote demo.

Been spening a lot of time for the past couple weeks prep'ing for the PDC. Working on one of the keynote demos, that incorporates most of the technologies that we will be talking about. It's a lot of fun. Got some great Indigo, Avalon, and some other fun stuff... all working together. I'm also spending time porting my book from May CTP to the PDC build. Man, the PDC bits are great. Still a lot of work to do, but the control set is a lot better, and generally the API cleanup is looking good. I'm pretty excited to get these bits out to customers.

At PDC 05 myself and two other architects from Avalon (Greg Schechter and Jeff Bogdan) are presenting "Under the Hood". Our goal with this talk is to give a overview of how we built Avalon. What the major sub systems are, how they act and interact. My plan right now is to go through the life of an application, from XAML and compilation to displaying pixels on the screen, then following how input gets from the keyboard/mouse to your element in memory. That's the first 30 minutes.

Then we want to do Q&A for 45 minutes. Any question about how Avalon is built, what things do, why we did it that way, what options did we not do, anything!

There is always a fear when you do these Q&A focused sessions that no one asks a question. So, I'd like to poll everyone to get some "feeder" questions. If you are going to the session - what are your questions? If you aren't going to the session - what are your questions? I'll try to answer as many as possible, and write the answers down and post them somewhere on the web (here, MSDN, something).

Thoughts? What do you want to know about the inner workings of Avalon?