PDC 2009, Day Two

I have been blown away by the interest in Axum from people I talk with here at PDC. In more than every other conversation I have had, it comes up, and not because I bring it up. We know that the download stats are fantastic for it, but it’s awesome to meet the people who downloaded it and tried it out.

Today, I spent about three hour in the booth talking to customers who stopped by. An interesting shift from last year, in my observation, is that we don’t spend as much time explaining the motivation and high-level details of the technology any more. People have already tried it, evaluated it, and are coming for advice on how to best apply it. As cool as it was to do demos last year, this is even more fun, meeting people who are using the runtime we’ve built.

The tools, in particular the profiler extensions, continue to awe people when they see it. It just seems to resonate very, very, well with everyone.

In the evening, we did ‘Ask the Experts,’ which is a big mixer over hot dogs and beer. Lots of people stopped by our table and wanted advice on how to put TPL, PPL, or Axum (don’t, just play with Axum) into production use. I ran into a bunch of fellow Swedes and got a chance to practice speaking techno in my mother tongue, which is rather rare (and feels very odd).

In Steven Sinofsky’s keynote, he announced that all paying attendees would be getting an Acer multi-touch tablet notebook computer with Windows 7 to take home. That beats most conference giveaways that I’ve experienced, and I could only lament that Microsoft attendees don’t count… Oh well, I’ll just have to buy one myself sometime.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s talk on Axum.