so the keynote we’ve all been waiting for has finally happened…this was a great first day in my opinion…

Highlights:

• BillG video with Napolean Dynamite — we saw this at some internal training and despite some parts being cut out, it was still hilarious (unless you have no idea who napolean dynamite is)
• Don Box making fun of the memory space VS2005 is using

What we saw:

• Vista: aero glass effects, sidebar & gadgets, parental controls, peer networking (people near me), stacked documents, virtual folders, etc.
• Office12: i’ve been waiting to say something about this for a while.  what a revolutionary change to some of the core application features in office, i’ll be waiting for this release VERY eagerly.  sharepoint is refined (better UI, secure-aware menus, recycle bin) and has a great new feature of the slide library…
• slide library allows a ppt to be uploaded and is disected to “items”
• you can then create a new ppt, adding items *from* a sharepoint lib and choose to keep them up-to-date: that’s right…they get changed in SharePoint and so does your powerpoint on your desktop! VERY cool
• Outlook12: very cool features for me to help better organize: enhanced “to-do” listing with tasks built in that roll to next days — so you’re always nagged
• InfoPath — surprising they didn’t show some of this stuff in the keynote, and I want to say something about what I like about InfoPath 12, but since I didn’t hear anything, I’ll wait.
• “lap around” — Don Box, Chris Anderson, Anders H, ScottGu collaborated on stage and showed:
• LINQ – integrated query language — query objects in code just like you would SQL in a database — and combine various data across multiple boundaries…very cool (note: some may have known some of this as parts of Zen)
• Atlas: new “ajax-style” web development framework for asp.net — cool VirtualEarth control: go get atlas here
• Microsoft Max — a full featured photo sharing app built using WinFX — very cool application and available for us all to use…

more to come…

as usual…get thousands of people with laptops in a room:

UPDATE: 1:20 PM PDT – Power goes out in the entire valley area.  PDC03 was fires, this year it is a power outage!

today is my first official day at PDC, however, there really isn’t anything “official” going on today unless you are in some of the pre-conference stuff.

who says you can’t have enough eggs:

here’s the main expo hall with the community lounge:

i’m meeting with the regional director team — which are community experts from across the world.  there are 68 RD’s represented from 26 different countries…that’s pretty cool.  the RD team are the ones helping out with the PDC Underground event (anyone/everyone is welcome) for the “Grok Talks Live!” concept.

this side meeting is an opportunity for the RD group to get information (mostly NDA until the weeks end) about what is going on with microsoft.  they are hearing about all sorts of things that we can’t write/talk about of course, but in a week, most will be made public.

the RD team is great and made up of a bunch of great people…a lot are here from my region: scott golightly, michael Palermo, richard Hundhausen, joel shirey, tim huckaby, etc.

led by kevin schuler:

the RD team continues to impress me and serve our community well.  we are having a dinner this evening with them and we’ll get a chance to talk more about how we can effectively work together to reach out to our development communities.

we finished up our west region de meeting and went out on the town.

we ended up at some saddle ranch restaurant at universal citywalk.

one of my counterparts, jmauer, got motivated to implement a “windows vista” inspired mohawk (it seemed appropriate to leave the red-eye in):

prior to a late dinner, i caught up with some phoenix guys (scott cate and brad meade) and scott showed me a bit of what he’s going to be showing at PDC this week with myKb.com:

   new UI and features — ajax style ;-)

we went to some saddle ranch place for dinner…that just happened to have a mechanical bull:

  
woodyp                                                                             jmauer

it was a pretty good time, but having been up at 5am, i was a bit tired…

“…on the road to PDC…” — seems like a common posting these days.  well, i shall be no different.

i’m actually going to PDC earlier to meet with my team prior and get some things hashed out with our goals for the year.

i’m really excited about this year’s PDC.  a lot of local community champions are going to be there and even two of them are exhibiting: Axosoft (Hamid Shojaee) and myKB.com (Scott Cate).  it will be really cool to see these guys exhibiting at PDC — it’s a large cost i know, but i think they’ll get gret value, exposure, etc. out of it.

i’ll be starting out tomorrow attending the regional director side meeting, with our local rd, michael Palermo.  then the community gang should be rolling in town and we’ll get going!

tuesday’s keynote sounds promising, with all different aspects of the dev teams being represnted…which should be interesting to see!