PDC05: A busy day two

After staying up
late last night, I got up early to register and watch the
keynote. I took the shuttle bus to the convention center and,
upon walking in, I saw I wasn't the only one with this bright idea.
Lots and lots and lots of people were in the registration lines. Rather
than try to check everyone one, the staff was very intelligently just passing
out bracelets that granted the bearer entry into the keynote and telling folks
to come back later for their badge and bag. I was impressed with the
organization.

 

Bill's keynote was
interesting and included an amusing video starring Bill and the Napoleon
Dynamite guy. I had to cut short because I had to meet a customer about 20
miles away. Stan Lippman,
who was presenting on C++/CLI at the customer site, and I took my
trusty rental car and headed in approximately the right direction. We
wandered aimlessly around the greater LA area for a while before practically
crashing into the customer's building. Luckily we left early, got there in
plenty of time, and the talk and meeting when well.

 

Afterward, we raced
back so I could spend the afternoon meeting with a few more customers. The
reason for all the meeting, by the way, is that we're making a concerted effort
to build VC++ with a sharp focus on how our customers want to use the
product. If a particular VC++ feature isn't important to enabling some
customer-driven scenario, it's unlikely to make it into the Orcas release.
Some high-level observations so far: customers are continuing to rely on C++ for
performance-intensive code but have also folded in C# where productivity is more
important. Those working with very large and/or complex data are very
interesting in 64-bit and the various techniques for concurrent
programming. C++/CLI is definitely the tool of choice to get maximum
mileage out of existing code while migrating toward the code base of the
future. A lot of MFC developers are asking, "what comes next for my GUI?"
WPF is the obvious answer for managed code. For native code, we're kicking
around the idea of enhancing MFC to readily surface some of the new GUI features
in Longhorn. I you have other ideas about where VC++ needs to go, let me
know.