PDC 2009 Day 2

If you've been lucky enough to be an exhibitor at a large conference, you'll know that after the hectic first day, the second (and subsequent) days are more measured. You find that you talk for longer with individual customers: they're not in a hurry and want to learn more about what your company does and you can provide more attention to them and their scenarios. Such was the second day today.

The other big event that affected today's booth "look-and-feel" was the announcements of this morning. The attendees learned all about Silverlight 4 and in addition were presented with an Acer Aspire tablet notebook that supports multi-touch. So, correspondingly we were asked more about our targets and controls for Silverlight and about our touch abilities.

Nevertheless, I spoke at length with Anthony our contact at Microsoft about the VSIP program and about our issues with VS2010 beta 2 (to summarize: the BeginInit/EndInit codegen bug has been fixed internally, there's still more to discuss re. Client Profile); I spoke with Joseph Hill and Geoff (I forget his surname) of Novell about Mono and ASP.NET (I shall have to get back to my experimentation: Mono have produced an add-in for Visual Studio to make it all easier); I spoke with customers of companies great and small about our products and our goals for the future. I did demos of XAF, of our new DXPivotGrid for WPF, of XtraReports and XtraCharts, of the Silverlight layout control. I discussed strategies for migrating an existing WinForms application to WPF and a Delphi 2006 application to Silverlight (despite no Embarcadero or RemObjects presence here at the conference, there are some Delphi people wandering around).

One theme came up time and again though: given the new announcements about Silverlight 4 this morning (especially regarding desktop use and access to native system resources like the filesystem), whither WPF? I had (and have) no great insights into this question unfortunately, although my gut feel is starting to need some Alka-Seltzer.

All in all a long, pretty tiring, day, but a day where again I've been bolstered in my belief that we at DevExpress are on the right track. Now to the internal Summit next month where we decide on the particulars and the roadmap for 2010.

And tomorrow is the last day of PDC. As I write this, I'm 48 hours from sleeping in my own bed again .

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