PDC05: Keynote notes

The PDC keynote was once again way too long. Even though I found it all reasonably entertaining throughout, the sheer length makes it difficult to remember all the individual pieces. The segment where Don Box, Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Guthrie and Chris Anderson put an app together with LINQ was fabulous and refreshingly free of marketing lingo, while, and in sharp contrast, the rep from the company Northface was difficult to listen to, to say the least (even though they had a cool demo).

The Anders/Chris/Don/Scott demo was the highlight for me; the "low point" was probably (and rather unfortunately) the "Netflix" demo, which was supposed to be a demo of the cross platform story for "Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere" (WPF/E), but turned out to be "just" 3 similarly looking, but different implementations of similar apps using similar visuals (one WPF, one Media Center and one for PocketPC) and the immediate reaction of the folks around me was "so what?". One more thing that I found a bit unfortunate was that every WPF demo stressed how "super easy" it was to do all those 3D effects and animations. After having played around with WPF/Avalon quite a bit in the past few weeks I can say that I can do lots of very cool things that were out of reach for me before, but "super easy" isn't exactly what I would call the current "hack it up in XML" development experience. Maybe they've been using tools that I don't know anything about yet.