The Microsoft Windows Anywhere (MWA) side-show at VSLive! in San Francisco was a lot of fun. The scheduling had me a little off balance: on Wednesday, I crammed 2 hrs of material on Advanced Tablet PC Development into one hour, and on Thursday, I stretched 1 hr's worth of material on network-awareness and power-management into about 2 hrs. So, overall, I hope nobody felt shortchanged.
Off-conference highlights:
- The Tablet-sponsored MVP social, Tuesday night, at a cozy little
art bar in the SOMA district.
Mary Jo Foley was there -- and judging by the timestamps on some of her
microsoft-watch.com articles Tuesday
evening, she was blogging telepathically while chatting with various 'softies and MVPs
over drinks. Scary! Also, I finally got a chance to meet
Julie Lerman, perhaps the most charming
and unwitting .NET rockstar you'll ever meet. Julie, next time you're in the
Seattle area, let me know -- we'll do sushi. Also also, I ran into
Christine Alvarado -- the brains
behind the original MIT research that eventually became the
Physics Illustrator powertoy that we (re)developed at
Leszynski Group. Welcome to the
west coast, Christine!
- Wednesday night, I went out on the town with Sean Campbell and Derek Pierson of
3 Leaf, and a friend of theirs. We saw
Beach Blanket Babylon -- recommended.
Earlier that day, Sean and Derek debuted Arcs of
Fire and the accompanying Game SDK for the Tablet PC that they've been working on.
Scorched Earth it ain't, but
interesting stuff, nonetheless. I've long wished my Tablet's stylus would work as
an input device for RTS games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, etc. It would beat
heck out of using a mouse to drag and drop infantrymen around, in the heat of battle...
- Thursday evening, a little wasted from delivering a 2-hr lecture on writing a killer mobile app, I went over to East Bay to hang with my homies. Then Friday, before flying home, I enjoyed a nice lunch with Dr. Neil Roodyn and Michelle McKelvey, MS's new Mobile PC Evangelist.
You see, last week was a bachelor party of sorts, for me -- my last chance to stand up on stage and say things, as a free man, with no direct ties to Microsoft. Next Monday, however, I start a new full-time role at MS: I'm to be the PM responsible for Tablet PC's integration into Avalon and WinFx. Wish me luck!
I'm excited to be a part of this effort. I believe that the Tablet PC is going to be a "killer platform" -- if there is such a thing -- for Avalon apps. Why? Looking back at all the tablet apps I've created over the past few years, many or most were full-screen affairs, with plenty of custom-rendered widgets (the bog standard common controls don't work well with a pen, by and large), nonrectangular regions, and semitransparent popup panels... Developing those sorts of apps with C# and WinForms v1 was like performing ice sculpture with a chainsaw. It was possible to produce results, but you had to be miraculously talented, every single moment of every single day. Hopefully, if we do our job right, Avalon will make the job a little easier.
