Nerd Stalker

Woke bright and early at the Venetian just to find that the hot water was off in the entire hotel. When I talked to the front desk they said the water was getting warmer and that it should be good in a few mins. 15mins later it's still arctic cold, come on were in a freakin desert and I cant get hot water? You should see all the half awake unshowered people here this morning, halrious. Breakfast was good, runny eggs and bomb cheese blintzes. I sat with a couple different developers both were very nice one from boston and the other never mentioned where he was from but rather that he was a php/linux developer. I asked him what the hell he was doing here, he said that microsoft gave his work a free ticket. Of course the first track i wanted to go to was overflowing so I sat through a different AJAX one on optimization that was very interesting. It ended early so I jumped into a real gem, electricrain has a powerpoint killer app that produces some amazing presentations. more to come.....

Oh yeah forgot to mention in my previous post to check out the picture of the blue screen of death I got when walking into the Microsoft Keynote this morning, hilarious. Pretty bummed at Microsoft they really blew it for developers at this conference as all of the developer track rooms are over flowing. Really poor planning on Microsoft which is really surprising. I had to defer 2 of the breakouts I wanted to attend, I checked out the "Sandbox" this morning which was probably the hidden gem of the event. At the sandbox they have tons of machines with virtual machines on them with labs of the various new technologies to try, it was pretty cool. Then sat through a cool track called "Developing Data Driven Applications Using the New Dynamic Data Controls in ASP.NET", problem is this stuff is still in the early phases and sort of sidtracks biz rules and the whole biz logic layer instead depending on future release of Linq. Tried to see the ajax patterns with asp.net tr...

So i'm at the Microsoft Mix conference here in Vegas and there is quite a buzz in the air here. Started with a great band that sounded like a mesh between oingo boingo and devotchka. Then Rey Ozzie took the stage to deliver the new path of microsoft, in short it's that for now there is going to be a connection between web and client apps as one is not dominating the other. Then he hyped Silverlight, which is squarely aimed at Flash and Flash video, looked nice but it's beta till the summer 1.0 release. They mentioned something called Photosynth for some uber powerful online photo zooming. Scott Guthrie then took over and mentioned Silverlight has a streaming option, a cross platform .net framework (yes runs on mac), demo's available for download starting today, silverlight.live.com free vid hosting/streaming, multi browser support, and support for virtually all programming languages. They are seeing a 300-1000% speed increase over using javascript. They showed demos run...