In addition to some of the Microsoft Tablet team being at the DevConnections because they were doing a full day pre-con and also decided at the last minute (or I only found out at the last minute) to do talks during the regular sessions as well, there was a definite, though concentrated, tablet buzz at the show. The most interesting thing they did was set up a hands on lab in the exhibition hall with 30 tablets, a few people from the team and happily for me, Lora Heiny and Loren Heiny. The hands on lab is the same one I did at TechEd and is really a fantastic walk through demonstrating to programmers how easily they can tap in to the inking functionality of the tablet as well as how deep the API really goes. The lab definitely needs a VB version. I was there helping some VB programmers out who, though trying to learn about the tablet api, were struggling with things like casing and other syntax problems that prevent C# from compiling. I think that will get done soon (I even offered to do it, but I think it will happen from within the team). The lab had a lot of people in it throughout the show, though, considering there were about 1500 attendees, the sessions themselves were not heavily attended. My session had some last minute changes since there were the extra sessions added in and I basically had to cut it in half. And those that did attend my session, where I walked through some of the tougher issues to deal with when writing an ink-enabled web application (using my online Doodle app as the my demo), had been attending many of the tablet sessions so they were light on questions.
It was fun to go to the famous Aureole restaurant that was right in the casino – famous to us, because it has a beautiufl tablet application to help clients sort through their thousands of bottles of wine. I think I blogged about it once and might dig up that link when I’m on line again. I went with Arin, Mark, Elliot and Mason from the tablet team as well as Kathleen who has a new M200! Thanks for the vino guys.
Most fun for me was to hang out a bit with Lora and Loren, though they weren’t around in th eevenings.
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