Well, I am back from the PDC and I am all teched out. After a few final classes we were back on a plane bound for good ole Tulsa, OK. I spent the weekend winding down from the trip (I hate travelling) and taking care of the chores that were in need of doing all week.

Now that I am back, it's back to work on the house. The design is going kind of slow but I expect it will speed up now that the basic design is in place. BTW, I sold the jasjar...it just wasn't the right device for me. I am considering getting either a TabletPC or a different PocketPC to program for, but for now I am just going to see what other devices are on the horizon. Well, as soon as my new iPod nano gets here :)

Yesterday was another good day at the pdc. Microsoft rented Universal Studios for a huge party. So, I got to watch thousands of nerds drink way too much and act like you would expect....like drunk nerds. The PDC is wrapping up tomorrow but my brain is pretty well fried. I just got out of an interesting talk about the future of C#. It covered new concepts such as anonymous types and implicit declarations. Most of the features are there to support LINQ which is the new standard query language which will work across data, xml and classes. It's really going to change how you write code but will not really be here for a couple of years.

In addition to this we spent much of yesterday and today learning about the new Windows Workflow Foundation. This is a new standard way of handling workflow operations in windows. Unlike BizTalk which is a big bloated mess, this baby is nice. Every workflow is devined via XAML and available at all tiers of the application. Like the improvements to C#, we will have to wait another year before we can start really using it but it's definately enough to make me rethank attempting to write workflow between now and then.

That's all for now. I am very tired from the weeks activities and I hate to say it but ....I thimk I am all teched out for a few days. Time to head home and get some sleep and processes the mountain of information I have stuffed in my head.

I am in LA this week attending the Microsoft Professional Developers conference. Lots to see. First off we saw the latest toys in Windows Vista and Explorer 7. Looks like MS has purchased a few copies of Apple OSX as they have done a beuatiful job of mimicing Expose bu with a little twist...literally. Now you can hit a key and see all of your windows pivot 45 degrees away from the screen. The effect is pretty snazzy. Not only that, I guess MS was getting tired if just adding catchup features to Explorer and decided to ad a really slick way of seeing all of your tab pages at once.

Next up was a demo of Office 12. This was much more mixed. The whole suite gets a facelift with tab icons replacing the existing and completely understandable menu structure.

Plus as a bonus to get us all to program for Pocket PC, they sold a lucky few the new iMate JazJar for only 150 bucks. I grabbed one even though I have no idea what I will do with it.

The rest of the day was spent sniffling from allergies that appearently are much worse in LA and learning about some cool techniques in threading and compiler construction.