We all gathered together at the office this morning at 9am, with a long list of items we'd forgotten to bring to the booth on the previous two days: another monitor, a vacuum cleaner, Jeff's tripods, etc. The booth was due to open at 11am in the Los Angeles Convention Center, and we knew that we'd need most of the two hours to wade our way through the LA rush hour traffic (in LA the rush hour lasts from 4am Monday to 9pm Friday every week) to make the journey from Glendale.
We met up with the BackBeats (the Beatles cover band we'd hired to support us during the first day) at the booth and made all the last minute changes and fixes to the booth, when suddenly the crowds descended upon us, and we were chatting with them, demonstrating our products, listening to their scenarios and problems to see whether we could help them or not. Paul and I also got to sign a whole lot of the DevExpress books and give them out.
Meanwhile, every now and then, Mark Miller would launch into another contest: can you write code faster with a keyboard than he can write with an Xbox guitar and CodeRush (not a keyboard in sight). So far today, the answer is no, although one contest got close when Mark started in VB, realized that a particular refactoring wasn't available, and had to start over in C#.
Other impressions: lots of questions about WPF and Silverlight (the latter because of the announcements about Silverlight 4 earlier on in the day); my discovery that in order to create a web application in XAF, I really should have installed Visual Web Developer (big handy hint there, people); installing the latest beta of DXperience v2009.3 this morning (the previous one was already 8 days old); Gary helping me over Twitter to improve the performance of WPF in a VM (answer: disable hardware acceleration inside the VM — another huge handy hint); giving out all our shrink-wrapped guitar t-shirts; the fun half hour before the evening session when we grabbed Scott Hanselman of Microsoft to play Beatles RockBand.
I've also had some time to browse some of the new feature in v2009 vol 3. I really must write some more blog posts tomorrow about them. But: cut, copy, paste of records between two grids in WPF? Yowza. Come on over to the DevExpress booth tomorrow if you want to see.
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