One down...

The first full day at PDC05 is complete!

Smart folks abound
It a great gathering of really, really smart people. More than any conference I've ever been to (and it feels like I've been to about a million of them), the people that I meet are very informed about technology. I guess it's because that's who PDC attracts: people who are interested in what's coming next in technology. The people who stop by the booth ask great questions. Other booths I stop by have interesting products. I guess it's a self-selecting group--only people who are interested in new technology attend a conference like PDC, so of course everyone there is interested in new technology. It's just nice to have a conference full of smart people.

It's about time for a chalk talk!
Rob did an interview for Doc Holladay's ISV Chalk Talk site. "Doc" has started a blog about "cutting edge tech trends," so it's cool that he asked Rob to be on. It's also great that he's got a blog that's aimed at ISVs. After attending the Worldwide Partner Conference I kind of felt like the ISVs get ignored in the huge partner ecosystem. Doc shows that Microsoft is listening to ISVs--we need places to go to find each other, too. It's going to be a great site--blog, forums, videos, podcasts--it'll be full of content.

Compute Cluster Solution
I had a good talk with Ryan Waite, Program Manager for the Compute Cluster Solution. They released their product to beta today, and they're pretty excited about it. He showed us their COM API, and talked a bit about their scheduler and its features. We talked about how the Digipede Network would work as a companion product to CCS. Most of the problems we solve are different than the problems you'd use CCS to solve, but it will be great to offer the products together so that CCS users can wring the most out of their cluster while taking advantage of all of the other machines in their enterprise.

One more cool thing
I think the coolest announcement from Microsoft I've read about (and it's hard to keep up; there are tons of them) is LINQ (Language Integrated Query). It

allows query expressions to benefit from the rich metadata, compile-time syntax checking, static typing and IntelliSense that was previously available only to imperative code.

In other words, you can write queries directly in your C# (or other languages); you get all of the benefits of fully typed variables. Compare that to how you structured queries before: write SQL queries as strings in your code, and have no possibility of checking syntax or types until runtime. It's awesome.