Back from the PDC

Got back in town last night and I'm still recovering, PDC was a lot of fun but it took a lot out of me.  It was great to meet Drew and Bonk (I missed Michael -- wanted to go to his Extreme Avalon birds of the feather session, but I had to prepare for my talk the following day).  Thanks for everyone who came to talk, slides are available on https://216.55.183.63/pdc2005/slides/PRS313_Kramer.ppt, I'll post source for my demos as soon as I get a chance.

My favorite part of the conference is talking to people, lots of great questions and lots of great discussions, I'll see if I can recap some of the highlights over the next few weeks.  Also a couple product announcements you may have heard about -- Sparkle and Cider.  I have to say, it's really nice that these are now public knowledge, I was getting a little tired of being asked "is they're going to be a designer tool for WPF?"  and having to answer "uh, we sure hope someone writes one".  Rob Relyea had to do quite a tap dance around this at his talk, since he talked before the product announcement, although it did give him a chance to show off Mobiform Aurora.

Other highlights for me -- Adam Nathan did a good talk on how he migrated a Win32 arts program to use WPF and indigo/Windows Communication Foundation.  And Mike Henderlight's talk about WinForms-WPF interop was extremely popular.  Have to say that I'm not crazy about how he used WinForms in xaml -- I'd rather write WinForms in code every time.  I understand the appeal -- we keep talking about xaml xaml xaml -- but at the end of the day, code is more practical for WinForms, since you get a graphic designer, and you don't need to wrangle with mapping clauses or with those WinForms APIs that don't support xaml requirements.  But Mike and I have been around on this several times, and we've agreed to disagree.  <g>

I also got to slip out to some non-WPF talks -- Rico gave a talk on CLR performance, and Raymond gave a talk on Win32 programming, both very well done.