Freigeben über

Silicon Valley Dev Lab (and it's nice to be home)

  • Artikel

I finally completed what turned out to be a busy few weeks meeting and working with VC++ customers.  First there was the trip to LA for PDC05, with lots of customer meetings.  Then back to Seattle for a week.  Then off to Washington, DC for a few days for a VC++ 2005 dev lab.  Then back to Seattle for a couple of days.  Then a personal trip down to San Diego for a couple of days to visit my little sister at her new home on the USS Ronald Reagan (pics here if you're the curious type). Then back to Seattle for a day to enjoy the last baseball game of the regular season with my family, where the Mariners took on my beloved Oakland A's at Safeco (the A's won - yipee!).  Then down to Silicon Valley for a few days for another VC++ 2005 dev lab (and, while in the Bay Area, to say hi to my Mom and Grandpa).  Finally, this week, back up to Seattle, where I will personally offer The People's Elbow to anyone that even says the word "airplane" in the next few weeks.  :)

Oh, interestingly, and to tie in the whole USS Ronald Reagan thing, the company that built the ship, Northrop Grumman (actually, the only company in the world capable of building a Nimitz-class carrier), is also a big user of VC++!

Where was I? Oh yeah, the Silicon Valley dev lab.  We hosted about a dozen ISVs at the MS Mountain View campus, and - like previous dev labs - spent a couple of intense days demonstrating VC++ 2005 and helping them migrate their code bases to the new compiler and tools.  We probably weren't quite as successful as we were at the Reston, VA lab, since we didn't get everyone converted by the end of the lab.  However, we came darn close.  Folks that didn't finish the port left mostly with some "busy work" type errors to correct, generally due to stricter standards conformance in the new compiler.  There was also a lot of interest in moving to managed code for the user interface bits of their applications.  Honestly, I was a little surprised by it, as I expect a little push back on managed code from developers that have been doing native C++ on Windows for a long time, but most seemed to think that doing a .Net GUI was almost a no-brainer given how easily C++/CLI enables them to tie it to their existing native code.

And in related news, I also heard back from one of the attendees at last week's lab in Reston.  Their app is now fully migrated, and he had an opportunity to benchmark their performance.  He was reporting double digit percentage speed increases versus the VC6-built version with the same compiler settings.  It will be interesting to see how much mileage they get out of the new optimization features, like PGO.  You might say to yourself, "well, duh, the new compiler should obviously be better," and that may be true, but it is gratifying to see when the team's work has such a positive impact on customers.

Comments