Well – what a day. We had a HUGE attendance (neck and neck with Seattle I think) 600+. There was great energy. All of the speakers were totally ON today and had a great time. The attendees were great. I got to hop on stage during the keynote and talk about the koolaid at the PDC. Actually, Carl asked what was the best thing. I said seeing long lines in front of the men’s room and none at the ladies! ha ha. Then of course I oohed and aahed about WinFS, Avalon and Indigo. How easy Indigo will be for people who want to leverage it but not get under the hood (WSE2 will be able to give you a taste of that) and the coolness factor of all of those FAKE computer programs on CSI coming to real life in Longhorn.

There were a LOT of people in the web track. I loved doing my talk. I wish I could spend a whole day on that so that I can feel like I really was able to teach people the real details. It’s frustrating to have so much great content and not a lot of time. I will continue to blog about some things here.

I had a number of women tell me that it made them really happy to see a woman speaker at such a big event. (hip hip hooray) It’s still hard to explain – but to me it’s about not feeling like an alien when you go to these things.

The nicest surprise in Boston was discovering that Omar Shahine was there staying in the same hotel. So we hung out last night (I had had dinner with Carl Franklin and Rory Blyth and talked with Omar while he ate a yummy sushi dinner) then after today’s show, everyone bolted and I wanted to wait out the traffic and storm before heading north to Nashua, so I tracked Omar down and we had dinner. It was fun learning about his background and how he came to Microsoft by way of Apple and is, as they all seem to be, very passionate about Microsoft as an incredible place to work.

Speaking of Rory – I did not see his smart client talk (same time as mine) however he was SO funny and fun when demoing C# generics during the closing keynote. Carl and Pat Hynds are just the funniest team when doing the keynotes.

The only bad part was the nasty snowstorm at the end of the day. I whiteknuckled it all the way to Nashua only to find when I arrived a tthe hotel that all of the Leszynski people who are running the TabletPC workshop tomorrow were stuck in Denver. So the event had to be cancelled (the weather here is enough to justify that anyway) Bummer. I was going to show off the corporate application that I have been working on for tablets! But I have a nice hotel room and will swing by a client’s office tomorrow on the way back to Vermont.

A special thanks also to all of the folks who handled the DevDays event in Boston!!!

Here’s the description:

This will be an opportunity to continue conversations begun at PDC as well as the TechEd 2004 Women in I.T. Luncheon. Meet other women who are programmers and discover that you are not, in fact, an alien! Chat about our visibility in the industry and other related issues that sometimes make us scratch our heads and wonder.

I tried to word this carefully so that nobody would start in on me. If you have any questions in that vein, just read this. The session is not intended to be some political bra-burning event. Do you know how expensive bras are, anyway? At PDC we had a cool discussion that involved also a lot of men who were curious about their daughter’s future in tech or trends they have noticed in university etc.

Personally I just love meeting other women at conferences who are programmers. I don’t feel quite so out of place. We have an abnormally high percentage of women in my user group, too.

There is also going to be a Women in Tech luncheon with a panel, similar to last TechEd. So I will pull some strings to ensure that this BOF is AFTER that luncheon.

Oh and go vote! It’s www.ineta.org/bof  then “proposed sessions”.

There are a bunch of other great sessions up there already, too.

My client has a recent hire with the last name O’Dell. In seven years of working with them, this is the first employee with an apostrophe in their name. I am suddenly discovering a few gaps with my applications. He’s a good egg and isn’t taking it too personally.

I love any excuse to make reference to the the iLoo! (evil laugh)

And I found a new excuse: Leon Bambrick has a funny (well, all of his posts are funny) look at some software that he things should be written – the toilet reservation system. Watch  out for those puns!

Now that my awareness is up about the issues with XP SP2 from this Infoworld article, I caught this article from Microsoft Watch that has some more information. (I really have not had time to look into this so I am grateful for Joris Evers and Mary Jo Foley’s articles on this topic). Mary Jo notes that there will be some service packs for VS.NET 2002 and 2003 in the wings to help with some of the breaking changes. However, everything else seems to be up to us – oh all of those VB6 apps I have out there…sniff sniff. I wonder about my older FrontPage and ASP sites and my friends who run their businesses with Access database.

Though I’m sure she  didn’t invent the phrase, Mary Jo Foley’s article on the MVP Summit is the first time I ever heard anyone refer to MVPs as the volunteer army. That’s pretty funny. My husband probably wouldn’t laugh though. The common joke around our house is that Microsoft has become my favorite charity organization, though the image of the red bucket and little bell doesn’t seem to fit.

A new article in InfoWorld highlights the issue of breaking changes FOR DEVELOPERS in the SP2 release of WinXP. According to Pat Hynds (New England RD and CTO at Critical Sites) if we a) are paying attention to the security messages for developers such as at DevDays and b) take note of the information that is on this MSDN page that is for developers to prepare, things shouldn’t be so terrible.

Apparently Microsoft has been getting the word out to developers. I actually hadn’t noticed that yet. I know we are getting lots of info on how to write secure apps (and I am sharing that as well). I just hadn’t heard yet that this is a breaking change.

I think what it means for me is 2 3 things:

1) I have to test ALL of the apps I have in production against SP2 before any of my clients start upgrading (ugggh…)

and

2) I need to be aware of what I will need to do differently in my development environment. Hopefully, this is akin to dealing with the change from IIS5 – ASPNET account to IIS6 – Network Service account. That wasn’t so horrible.

3) (added) Oh yeah, and I don’t have a spare computer that I dare install the SP2 on to do all of this testing. This is a big problem. I have whidbey on my laptop and need it to work for learning and for upcoming presentations. I already have the Lonestar beta on my tablet and have to assure that I can use that to do my DevDays demos at Boston, plus I don’t feel like installing all of my apps and dev tools on there anyway. My husband uses his computer for doing paperwork for his business. So I’m kind of up a creek right now anyway.

From that page (link is above):

To developers these technologies will have impacts on the applications that they create and the tools they use. This page contains resources to assist developers in dealing with these impacts.  

From the article (quoting someone from MS)

Large vendors of software are getting help from Microsoft to make sure their applications are compatible with SP2, Goodhew said. Smaller vendors and others, such as enterprise software developers, need to do their own testing. “It is really up to developers to do the due diligence,” he said.

If developers do find that SP2 breaks their applications, it most likely means that they were not following best practices in terms of security when writing their applications, according to Goodhew.

Definitely pay attention to this!!!

In the long run it is a good thing of course. I just wish someone from Microsoft would come to *my* home office and make sure everything is still working! Pancakes and maple syrup anyone?? 🙂

I was thinking about the Whidbey bits in the DevDays bags. This is not the same audience of leading edge developers that go to PDC. I wonder if it’s just “yet another cd” in the bag or if people are tripping over themselves to get home and install the bits and check out Whidbey. Has anyone heard any type of buzz about this from attendees?

PASS will be in Orlando this year. Roman Rehak says there is one more week for proposals. More info at his blog here. Roman was the track chair in 2003. I’m guessing he is again for 2004.

Peter Rysavy LOVES infopath (here and here). His love is noted by Robert Scoble.

Dave Burke is not so in love with infopath. Dave’s opinion was noted by Joris Evers of IDG and Dave was interviewed for this article about InfoPath in InfoWorld!