.: Microsoft DevDays ’09
Yesterday, I went to the Microsoft Developer Days, held this year in The Hague. While I couldn’t really find any work-related presentations that I wanted to go to, I made my selection on the fly. My choices were pretty good with the exception of the Win7 introduction by two obviously carefully picked Microsoft pre-sales consultants, who obviously did drink the KoolAid.
I had been a little concerned with the possible level of experience needed for the talks, but that turned out to be no problem…until I got to the last presentation of the day titled “Threading, Tasks and Parallel Processing.” While the subject wasn’t something I had any experience with, but I did know most of the concepts and terminology. Or so I thought. The guy who gave the presentation was so fast, so sharp and so intelligent that I had a hard time keeping up with him. My understanding kept lagging behind about fifteen minutes (which also meant that I only figured out the last fifteen minutes of his presentation when I was already on my way home.) Interesting stuff, though.
I think that of all the presentations given, for me, the Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks talk held by Sara Ford was the most directly beneficial. I liked her presentation because it wasn’t so self satisfied. She was obviously a bit uncomfortable on stage, which gave her a nervous energy which boosted her outward enthusiasm, which, in turn, was very contagious. She had been on the VS2008 testing team and really knew everything inside and out and she was obviously very genuinely passionate about the IDE, however disturbing that might sound.
All in all pretty good stuff, and I was very proud of myself when I walked out without any useless shwag.
.: Evil Care Bears
Were there ever any evil care bears? OR should they be called Neglect Bears? Anyway, the smurfs had evil, green smurfs, and I’m certain the snorks had some evil-doers among them, but I can’t remember the care bears. On my way to work I worked out which “stare” the neglect bears would have if they were followers of one of the four chaos gods of Warhammer 40K. Nurgle’s followers would obviously vomit pestilence and disease in a stream of bile from their little bellies, while I could see followers of Khorne shooting red hot magma. Tzeentch’s followers would shoot a ray that would warp everything it touches, causing painful and cancerous mutations. Obviously, followers of Slaanesh would just have a devastating laser beam.