9:55am — Attended Rob Relyea’s “What’s new in WPF 3.5″ presentation and as expected he talked (and demoed) a lot about the coming “Servicing Release.”   Some really excellent questions followed.  Rob took a lot of notes, promising followups on his blog. Had a very interesting conversation with Vincent Dumas, Director of Software Development at Xceed (by far the best WPF data grid vendor), after we both were knowingly grinning at the question being asked by a Telerik guy (Pavel Ganev). Watch the video. <–will add link when it’s posted.

Rob Relyea is one of the best MS presenter’s I’ve experienced.

Waiting now for Karen Corbey’s “Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2.0 Controls. The huge Lando room is packed.

12:53am — Got a great front-row seat at the Keynote about to start.

2:29pm –  Got some great up-close photos of Steve Balmer and Guy Kawasaki Iincluding Balmer doing the “web developer monkey”) during the very entertaining keynote (will upload and link later). Check the video: I was in the field of view of a roaming camera during the last question of the Q&A.

Now, just started is Mark Wilson-Thomas’s presentation on WPF and Visual Studio 2008 (Mark is on the Cider team as is my friend and fellow ex-HPite, Jim Nakashima)

 8:25pm — A long day!  Ended with the Virtual Earth presentation. Very impressive new stuff. Chris Pendleton demonstrated an in-beta project that combines Silverlight, Deep Zoom and Virtual Earth. Extreamly cool! I’m going to have to re-build my 5-year-old 3.7 Gigapixel zoomable aerial of Fort Collins using the very impressive Deep Zoom Composer!  Chris also had a very interesting response my question about parcel data (’what is VE’s response to Google’s mashup of parcel data in maps for all of Australia?’).  Apparently VE has partnered with a major parcel aggregator (I’ll track down the name, I heard of them at the GIS/CAMA conference a couple weeks back. 80% of US parcels) and will soon be doing something very similar for VE in the US! More fodder for my map visualization initiative.

Deep zoom (which uses PhotoSynth/Seadragon technology) was demoed yesterday at MIX and is currently showcased in an impressive Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia site.

Filed under: Software Design, Travel