Yes, it's time to return to reality. This PDC has been amazing. It was so awesome to talk to all these people. Everyone had great questions and comments on what we are doing (especially on the desire for a visual designer for XAML <G>) and it was so much fun to finally meet a bunch of the bloggers that I read on a daily basis.

We stayed last night and had a great dinner as a celebration of finishing the event up. I don't think things could have gone better. Sure, we had a few demos fail, but I keep hearing that people had so much fun.

I think one of my highlights from this convention were the number of times people said stuff like "You folks are developers just like us!". I heard that multiple times, and it is awesome - because we are. Way too often people get wrapped up in the "Microsoft is evil" mantra and they forget that we are just a bunch of folks trying to write great software. It was so wonderful to make connections with so many people, and I really hope that we are able to keep up this communication.

What is next?

For the Avalon team it is time to execute. We have spent a big chunk of time in this past year doing a big rearchitecture (which is why the wierd "MSAvalon" namespace is in the bits) and now we need to get heads down and start cleaning up and getting ready for Beta 1.

The developer preview bits that we delivered for the PDC aren't ready for any form of production use (put them on a test box, or use Virtual PC - not on your main machine), but for the Beta 1 bits we need to be rock solid. We are going to get down to fundamentals and really push on performance, stability, and completeness for the next set of milestones leading up to Beta 1.

My flight back to Redmond leaves at noon, so we are all heading out from the hotel at around 10:15... a few more minutes to check email and maybe grab a quick bite...

Yesterday, woke up at 4:30... today woke up at 6:15 (after going to be at 3:00am)... i'm about to fall asleep...

tonight I've got booth duty in the Pavillion for 3 hours, and then I have a "critical" party to attend... time to crash for a quick 45 minute power nap.

continued...

I get a call from Kevin Gjerstad who is in LA trying to coordinate getting everyone there. He suggests I rent a car and drive... it is now 11:00. I go get a car and try to get my luggage... breaking news - my flight leaves at 11:45. I book up to the gate, only to find that we are waiting until 12:45 for the next update.

I setup the DVD player and a bunch of people huddled together to watch True Lies.

At 2:00 they announce that the flight is cancelled.

Get the car. Hear that it might take 15 hours to drive to LA. Panic is setting in, slightly. Ended up hooking up with 2 other passengers, getting in the car, and heading out.

I have a much better appreciation for reality TV now. Adam, Kim and myself drove for 8.5 hours from Reno to LA, talking almost constantly. Topics ranged from politics, religion, family, and technology. We drove through the wildfires (a small portion) and got to see "Mono Lake".

I got into LA around 11:00pm. Parked the car outside the hotel... jogged in. Dropped off my luggage, dropped off the car, got in a cab. Got to the convention center around 11:10. Quick attempt at a dry run.

Need beer. Stop off at a bar, get some food and beer. Hang out until 2:15am. Get back to hotel - realize that I need to unpack my clothes, hang them, etc. 3:00am get to sleep.

Wakeup call at 6:15.

Just finished my keynote demo. It was absolutely a blast. I had so much fun on stage with Don. I hope everyone enjoyed it!

In case you are wondering, the final demo that tanked was not intentional. :)

To give you a little of the behind the scenes fun...

I woke up this morning at 6:15, after being up until 3am. I'll fill in the rest of the details of my fun trip to the PDC in a bit, but for now, lets just say that it was not a relaxing day. I was supposed to meet Don in the lobby at 6:45 to walk over to the convention center, but he slept in (slacker!).

We got over to the convention center around 7:15, and did a quick rehearsal and tech check. Got some prep from hair and makeup (yes, they had to get rid of the bags under my eyes...). Then we waited. And watched from behind the screens. And paced.

We walked up the back stairs about 5 minutes before we were called on. It was amazing, the tension and energy was absolutely intense. Our names were called and we went out.

It was a 60 minute bungee jump...

Getting to finally blow the lid off all the stuff that our teams have been working on has been amazing.

While it was Don and I on stage, the work we showed was only possible with the thousands of people working on Avalon, Indigo, WinFS, Visual Studio, MSBuild, etc, etc... It was amazing that all of this stuff fit together and worked (mostly) seamlessly.

Yes, I am but a wanderer in this land, forced to go from place to place looking for a way to get to LA...

I wake up bright and chipper at 4:30am - today is the day. I am going to fly to LA and tomorrow I will present for my biggest audience ever. Wow! Drive to Microsoft and drop off my car, my wife drives me to the airport. I jump out of the car and get in line to checkin... Megan comes dashing in with my cell phone and sunglasses - doh! Disaster avoided.

I booked the wrong flight, so I took off at 7:45am and went into Reno. I had a portable DVD player, fully charged, so who really cared - just watch an extra movie. Land in Reno, and wait for about 20 minutes while the people get off, and the new group boards the plane.

We sit. Our flight has been delayed. I load up Matrix Revolutions and zone out. No big deal. Oh, our flight was delayed due to fires in LA. We get the option to get off the plane if we want to stretch our legs - I get off to walk around, and maybe charge my DVD player.

... to be continued.

Should be in LA around 1pm after ground transportation and everything else... yeah baby!

Steve Cellini pointed out that in my previous blog entry I wasn't quite accurate... in his words:

"Actually… we haven’t promised that :-) Won’t be in the keynote room, for instance. 802.11b can’t deal with thousands of closely packed souls all trying to get an IP address. Maybe at the next PDC we’ll using something better (802.11g can handle this, apparently, but IANANE). We will be using a modified form of the “Warchaulking” symbol to indicate areas that we have explicitly rigged for WiFi.

We have tried to get it right in the track lounges, breakout rooms, and other common areas, but we’re still dealing with an inexact science and a crummy protocol. We will have radio-dispatched folks patrolling around keeping tabs on the state of WiFi and reporting back to the IT command center (buried deep in bedrock 200’ below the conference center)… our hope is that we’ll be able to react in real time to problems and keep people informed about areas that are over/under-utilized. We will also have some number of hard-wired access points…

Hope this helps - Steve"

I'm going to try and find the IT command center while I"m there!!!! ;-)

I love Halo. I play Halo. I'm acceptable at Halo. I've played Halo, on average, 3 hours a week every week since it was released.

Looks like we have 8 XBoxes with 2 Controllers... unfortunately that means there will be a maximum of 8-way Halo... halo has a max xbox per game of 4... I'll have to see if we can get someone to bring an additional 16 controllers so that we can run 2 simultaneous 16-way games (which are absoluetely amazing)...

Anyone want to play?

They (the preverbial "they") have promissed wireless access almost everywhere, so I should be on IM the entire week - chris_l_anderson@hotmail.com... in addition I (hopefully) will have no problems blogging and accessing email from the event. However, as an advance warning - this is going to be a buzy (re: work work work) PDC for me. Sunday is rehearsals, Monday is the keynote, a lunch meeting with some content winners, and 3 hours working in the Pavillion - which makes for an 8am to 8pm work day. I thought these things were supposed to be junkets??

Tuesday we've got the .NET Show and Ask the Experts (that should be a total blast), and the fun continues - Wednesday is my talk (CLI303 @ 3:15 in room 150/151)... Thursday I'm on a panel, and judging a content... man this is going to be a great week.

I hope to hit the party that Don Box and the Band of the Runtime will be playing at - I hope it doesn't get really going until after 9!

I'm also going to be moblogging, as will probably everyone else :-)

Also, I'll be hanging out whenever I can at the "Client Track Lounge", which will provide a place for everyone that wants to chat about client technologies to hang out - wireless access, snacks, etc...

Oh, and I want to figure out some BoFs to go to... maybe try to catch some panels... ugh... too much to do.

Wednesday night I show up at Don's office for my first round of training at around 8pm. 4 hours later I emerge. That was 4 hours of great, amazing, "constructive" criticism.

Thursday, I start rehearsing at 9am. At 1pm I meet with one of the lead program managers - 60 minutes of more "constructive" criticism. 2:30pm, I meet with the PDC speach coach. I told him that I wanted to rehearse my keynote demo instead of my session. 90 minutes of constructive feedback.

Friday, rehearse in my office for a while. Couple of meetings and other distractions. Don swings over for a video taping that we are doing. I try, unsuccessfully to say my pitch. I still need more rehearsal.

I love constructive feedback. "You did good" doesn't really help that much, except to make you feel better. Feedback like "slow down" or "punch your words more" help... positive feedback like "your energy and volume was good" also help... more than anything though, constructive criticism is what I crave. Of course several days straight of that can be a bit challenging to one's ego... but you know what - if this was easy it wouldn't be any fun!

I am going to succeed at this. I have 20 hours of practice budgeted for next week. Being a good presenter is really hard work. After the keynotes, you will have to say if I succeeded or not...

Last night I worked late into the night with master yoda to learn to be at one with the force, to channel the force for good, and above all to stop being so damn low key.

Presented the current draft Don and my demo to our VP today. Didn't go too well... since we had just gotten the parts put together the night before, we didn't have the polish that we should have. In addition I talked instead of Don.

I have a confession to make - I am mediocre at presenting. I want to be great at it. I aspire to be great. I am falling short of that right now. In my dry run yesterday I did "OK". I managed to get my points across, no one fell asleep, and I believe people understood what I said.

I don't want to give any false modesty - I think I'm good at presenting, better than a lot of people. There are some really bad presenters out there. I would give myself a B rating. The issue is, that just like coding, the best speakers are 100X or 1000X better than the "OK" presenters.

Obviously I can't go from a B to an A in the two weeks between now and PDC. However, as with anything, the key is to recognize your need to improve, formulate a plan, and execute. I am going to nail my demo and my talk.

My plan - practice.

Today (well, yesterday) was a really long day. I worked most of the weekend on my presentation, and was tired in the morning so I decided to sleep in. Of course, today was the day that my wife forgot some stuff at home so I got woken up by a phone call to go deliver stuff up to her high school. Fun.

Anyway, so I worked most the day on finalizing the script and minimalistic slides for my talk, and then gave the dry run at 3pm.

Things went OK... some demos failed (to be expected, this was the first time I had tried the entire presentation end to end) and I felt that I didn't quite know the script well enough - had to consult my notes too much, came off a bit stilited, etc... All kinks that will get worked out with practice. For the first time ever I have too much content for my presentation... I typically talk too fast in my presentations and always finish early - this time I talked too fast and finished on time :-)

Around 7:30pm I went over to Don's office and we worked on the demo that we are doing together. Around 11pm we connected the "final mile" and completed the entire demo end to end for the first time. It was awesome. This is going to be so much fun to give this demo to thousands of developers in a couple weeks.

You'll have to ask Don what his feelings are about programming with Avalon now that I got him to write some code with it...

For those of you keeping track... left the house at 7am, returned at 12:15am... 17 hours clearly isn't the longest day I've spent at work (or running around), but it's a pretty solid day's effort!

I spent the day working on my PDC presentation that I have to do a dry run on tomorrow. Of course, today I got hit by multiple issues... some hardware, some software, some with released software, others with beta... This always happens right before a deadline...

Went out to dinner with Don at one of his favorite India resteraunts... I showed Don my new camera, so I had to get a correctly lit picture.

Don gave me some great advice on "code centric" presentations... "Never you notepad". If you want to demo something without the magic of VS, then you should use a programmer's editor (Emacs, SlickEdit, etc.)... no one really codes in Notepad, and so you are really just making it that much harder on yourself.

Good advice.

Did a slide review today... I got some skeptical responses to my new style... today I started working on the "notes" of the presentation... basically I'm writing a document that is the written equivalent of my spoken presentation (not a prepared speach, more like a rambling caught in Word)... I'm up to 3.5 pages... tomorrow I need to finish it... Turns out that I have a dry run early next week...

I'm cancelling most of my meetings next week to finish up for the PDC...

Andrew gives his wish list for Longhorn - Part 1 and Part 2... On the surface I agree with his desire for more stability - and for an improved IE. To me it feels like IE hasn't had a major overhaul in a long time... Office XP felt kinda like that - happily Office 2003 rocks... it just goes to show that even after some amount of stagnation some of these folks can come up with great features (like making Outlook work)... <G>

(Standard disclaimer... my personal view... blah blah...)

I went to PDCBloggers which took me to Benjamin Mitchel who brought me to Eric Gunnerson who then brought me to "Presentation Judo"... and I liked presentation judo.

I'm trying a new presentation style in my break out session. I attempted it at the conference I was at last week and it went pretty well. My goal will be to have the fewest power point slides with the fewest words of any presenter. Hopefully I won't crash and burn!

Everytime I go to a conference I always have enough of a change in my title or group that I need new business cards... I have a full box of business cards (250) (well, ok, I think I gave 3 away to a couple of people at work)... I want to have none left by the time I leave the PDC... There are supposed to be 7,000 or more people at the PDC... I just need to convince 3.5% of the audience that I'm interesting enough for them to ask for my business card... ?

So Brad and I chatted on the bus ride back from our conference about demo'ing at the PDC. My view was that we should show code and demos that attendees could immediately use - that showing "real" code that would work on the bits they got was the key. Brad felt that we should demo with the latest daily build of Longhorn to show most accurately where we thought we were going. Looking at Brad's posts their appears to be a unanimous vote for using the latest bits.

Of course, everyone says "but the samples should work on the bits that attendees get"... double duty for the presenters, their demos on stage should work with the daily bits, but their samples should work with the PDC build... not a big deal for most people, but a few presenters I'm sure will have demos that can't be done at all on the PDC build...

This discussion about demos at the PDC has got me thinking... I remember talking with Scott Guthrie about a demo he gave at a keynote a couple years ago. While running the demo on stage he had another PM back stage running through the demo at the exact same speed on an identical machine. The idea was that if something bizarre happened they could switch back to the other machine and not miss a beat. Scott's idea was that when you have 6,000 people watching anything that can fail, will - and you want the attendees to really see a nice polished demo.

I compare this to one of Anders Hejlsberg's keynote demos. He had found a late breaking bug in a component that he wanted to demo, so he got the developer to fix it and give him a private build - which he installed on his personal laptop. So Anders goes on stage in front of 6,000 people using his daily use laptop (that he hadn't reformatted in 3 years) with an untested private build of key component. No saftey net, nothing. It went off without a hitch.

Now I'm faced with giving a keynote demo in front of (what looks to be record breaking numbers) a huge crowd, my biggest audience yet (1,500 was my previous record). Will I do the full on saftey net? Will I fly without a harness?

"Interesting, what's the definition of "real production code" here? Normally, I would suggest, that implies that is code that is shipping or damn near ready to ship - its not prototype, or alpha or beta, its code in production and in use.

So almost all the Longhorn demos are on real production code? This would imply Longhorn has gone gold - would be a shocker!" [Pete]

Let me clarify what I meant... Typically there are 4 kinds of demos...

• Demos using "gold" code - using a shipping product to show you something you can do... this is the majority of TechEd demos.
  
• Demos using "to be shipped" code - using a alpha/beta/internal/etc product to show you something you will be able to do (or can do with the alpha/beta/etc bits)... this is what the PDC is striving to do with their demos
  
• Demos using "hacked" code - using a custom built hand coded build of the product that will never ship and was put together just to show something off that "might" be possible... these are the "smoke and mirror" demos that people always hate. Once in a while we are forced to do these for various reasons (like a late found bug in a build for a "to be shipped" demo that we can't work around, etc). These "hacked" code demos at least show that what is demo'd is possible...
  
• Demos using "no" code - using powerpoint, director, videos, etc to show a vision of something. These are used typically to show general direction and get people excited.

Obviously given that Longhorn has a while until it ships, we can't really demo using "gold" bits... however we are all trying (all the presenters I have talked to at least) to use the "to be shipped" bits... we are actually trying to do our demos using the same bits that attendees will get.

Of course, some demos will need private bits, some demos will be done with no code, etc... but most of us are really trying ;-)

Today had the first review about the keynote content that myself and Don are working on. It went well, although I volunteered to have a complete script written in a week and a half, with working code up and running for a live demo in 2 weeks... guess I have to get it done sooner or later!

One of the coolest things about this PDC - almost all of the demos (including the keynotes!) will be using real production code...

Wesner gives his view about how important Avalon is...

"Chris Anderson is a software architect working on the Windows Client team responsible for the technologies code named “Avalon”.  Chris has worked on the .NET Framework class libraries (including Windows Forms and ASP.NET).  Prior to that worked on the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC), Visual J++ 6.0, and Visual Basic 6.0.  Chris has given presentations at many conferences around the world, and this will make his third appearance at PDC."

I hate writing bios for conferences... It always sounds like you are bragging about yourself... My first conference my then manager helped me write an awesome bio - i can't remember the exact words but it went somthing like:

"Chris Anderson was born in the mountains of Switzerland where he was raised by wild mountain goats. He stumbled into a village when he was young where they took him in and taught him to code. Now he works at Microsoft and has mostly stopped eating the foliage."

Marc had a much better flair for this stuff (yes, this is the same person that named a variable fBobDoleIsGod), but you get the idea.

One thing I like about JavaOne is that the speakers always have to justify to the audience why they should be allowed to speak. You end up with the various people giving you at least a couple sentances about what they do and how that makes them an authority on the topic.

So let me see, why should anyone believe what I say at the PDC?

I have worked on the .NET Framework since it's inception (depending on how you track the history of the .NET Framework I'm sure that people can claim they started earlier than me - especially some of the folks on the CLR team - but I was there from pretty early on). With Longhorn the .NET Framework is going to be even more important to the OS.  In addition I have been working with the Avalon team for almost 2 years now, and I have been an architect on the team for the past 10 months (I'm pretty sure the transfer happened in November?)...

The Avalon team was formed quite a while ago (I believe almost 3 years ago), and my involvement before I joined the team was mostly around helping them with the programming model. Even so, in the past 10 months I think that I have managed to get pretty deep into the product... After the PDC I'll regale you with some of the stories of the fun we have had this year!

Organizing an event like the PDC is a big thing, so the people running these always push to have things done before the event (foolish people)... For example, yesterday the rough outline and talking points about my AppModel talk where due. Shockingly I did get it basically done, but of course I forgot to submit it to the web site.

In addition to my talk, I'm working on some technical content for one of the keynotes. Again, in an effort to not have last minute panic and mayhem I have a review with the exec on Monday to see what I've come up with (oh, and I have a partner in crime on this one). Of course, for this one I'm a little less ahead of the game - I need to get this stuff written before Monday (uh oh! just noticed the meeting isn't on my schedule... need to track that down asap).

Oh well, I didn't need to do anything else this weekend (except blogging, of course!)

I am way behind on my presentations for the PDC, so I decided to labor on labor day... Need to get my app model talk up and running, and at least have a first pass at the slides. This year I'm splitting two app model talks with another speaker, so the amount of collaboration that will be required for that talk will be a lot more than I'm used to...