Monday, October 27, 2008

PDC 2008 opened: "Think way outside the box!"

PDC 2008 was opened today with its pre-conference. The agenda looks pretty "cloudy" and even the posters show clouds - see below.

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What a shift for a company like Microsoft - the cloud and verbs like [scale], [interoperate] and [extend] might be more important than the announcement of Windows 7?!

I was attending the WPF pre-conference session held by Windows GUI guru Charles Petzold.

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Petzold gave the audience detailed and completely powerpoint-free demonstrations about his experiences with the WPF object model, best practices in control and template design, talked a lot about dependency properties and showed the enormous power of XAML scripting. It was quite fun watching him showing the basic concepts using his XAML Cruncher - even if he didn't mention any groundbreaking new stuff for WPF experts...