Author: colinizer

PDC 2008 Is Not Sold Out – Is There a Virtual Option?

colinizer Microsoft, PDC, Sheep

PDC starts in less than 4 days (or 3 if you include the pre-conference events) and it has not officially sold out yet.  They have reached their 10,000 registration goal (that’s $20M+ in revenue!) and plan to take registration up until the first day if it doesn’t go over capacity.

Some people may be surprised that it isn’t sold out at this point.  I’m wondering if the secrecy factor and the burn-factor from Vista’s first exposure at a PDC (WinFS anyone?) had an effect.

10,000 is a great achievement and there are carrots in place to encourage people to go to the event, including overtures of attendee-only content on free hardware.  I for one don’t have time to divert my attention to a week someone else right now.

While the bread crumbs have been laid out in principal about what will be talked about, it’s not yet clear what virtual attendees (that’s you and I observing from a far) will get.

Mix 08 was a great experience at a distance and my experience was that it was possible to keep up, if not stay ahead of those people immersed in-person.  Mix sessions were available on-demand a pleasingly short, though not impressively quick amount of time.

The first Keynote (of 4; 2 more on Tuesday and 1 on Wednesday) is at 08:30PT/11:30ET on Monday, but there’s no mention of a Live webcast.  I hope this is made available, as to not have it seems like somewhat of a cliquey shun, and they do have $20M+ in revenue to help cover it, plus I’d happy to pay $200 for full live access to a live keynote, live track switching, on-demand events and on-the-day download availability.  If they put together a Silverlight site of mammoth (albeit with underwhelming branding) streaming site for NBC Olympics, PDC should be a breeze.

A quick google search doesn’t reveal anything for a PDC keynote webcast.

In the meantime, if you like being teased, check out the PDC08 tagged videos on Channel9.

UPDATE 2008/10/24:  According to a response from Microsoft’s PDC logistics provider, they will be streaming the keynote and sessions within one to two hours of their completion at the PDC website.  I guess they are holding out for as many last-minute registrations as possible before publishing the details of live/on-demand resources.

Windows 7 Developer Resources off to a Worrying Start

colinizer Microsoft, Sheep, Windows 7

Microsoft has a Windows 7 developer blog with its first post today.

With your help, this blog should evolve to become some sort of Windows 7 developer content index.

Ugh.  I certainly hope not.  Blogs are the worst places to look for information if you don’t know its there, having to rely on search engines to find the information, unless you want to get your content spoon fed to you as random prizes over time in your cereal box.  Microsoft needs to develop a systematic way of getting blogged knowledge, samples and tutorials into a central location.  Oh wait, that’s called MSDN, where sadly, the reverse it true.  Developer center sites point out to the blogs.  While this has made some at Microsoft into celebrities, it doesn’t do much for efficiency.

The number of grammatical errors in this new post are somewhat worrying too.

Playstation Network vs. Xbox Live – Who Is The Clingy One?

colinizer PlayStation, Sheep, Xbox

I received an email today about updates to the Playstation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement.

The following appears to be a new clause under “The violations that are prohibited…” section:

“You may not provide anyone with your name or any other personally identifying information other than your own Online ID, or the name, password or personally identifying information of any other person or business through any means, including messaging, chat or any other form of PSN communication”

I’d like to point out that this is a horribly ambiguous sentence following “other than”, but appears to say that you cannot let people know who you really are or how they can contact you by any other means.  I can understand why one should be warned not to do this, but I don’t think it should be prohibited – plus they reserve the right to monitor communications.  If this were a pay-per-view community, I could understand it, but it’s not, and if people form virtual friendships, this would appear to prevent them from taking them into real life.

I did a quick check of the xbox live agreement and couldn’t find anything quite so… possessive.

Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 RC0

colinizer Microsoft, Silverlight, Web Application

So it’s getting there.

Today Scott Guthrie announced the RC0 release, along with some commentary on what’s new in that.  The bet has to be that the final release (RTW) will be on or before PDC 2008 at the end of October.  You can get the goodies on the silverlight.net site.  Note that it’s only a release for developers (using VS2008) and includes the runtime, but it’s not intended for public deployment – it’s a pre-RTW testing opportunity for developers.  There’s also a Blend 2.0 SP1 preview to target RC0.

Anyone with the 2.0 Beta 2 or 2.0 RC0 runtimes should get an auto update to 2.0 RTW when it’s available.

SQL 2008 RTM

colinizer Microsoft, Silverlight, SQL Server

As I speculated, um just yesterday, SQL 2008 is now available through some channels, according to announcements apparently made at a TechEd conference in South Africa.

I was expecting this after Silverlight 2.0 so could 8/8/8 (August 8 2008) be not only a lucky day for the Chinese (and the opening ceremony of the Olympics in China), but also be Silverlight 2.0’s official release?

I haven’t checked to see if the VS 2008 tools for SQL 2008 are also being released.