Glory, Hope, and Fame at the PDC

Waiting for my ridiculously priced latte this morning (I am a Seattleite, after all) made me miss the intro to Eric’s keynote session. As I was walking toward exhibit Hall A, I noticed people conspicuously looking at me. I thought it was because I had a big LINQ button around my neck– with everyone so excited about the technology they all wanted to stop me in the hall and ask me some hard questions. But no, apparently I made several cameos in a Channel9 video montage that prefaced the keynote this morning in which I say, uh, things, uh, like, and uh… After all, they say that once a video is on the net, there’s no telling where it will be replayed.

After stopping by the pavilion, tools and languages track lounge, and the Hands On Labs to install the newest VB 9.0 bits into every machine I could find, I went to Dave Campbell’s session on the Future of Data and Programming where Dinesh gave a great demo of DLinq in action (using C#) and Pablo did showed client views (with Visual Basic – the use of which received cheers and applause from the audience.)

While hanging out in the lounge and pavilion, I ran into Doug Purdy who asked me where he could download a more recent copy of the VB 9.0 bits. Apparently his session on Friday – “WPF (Avalon) + WCF (Indigo) = Magic” – with Chris Sells will be entirely in Visual Basic. Doug and Chris are always great to watch. I will definitely be attending that session. But… I’m torn because Dave Remy’s XLinq overview talk will also show the XML literals and late binding over XML features in Visual Basic 9.0. Decisions, decisions…

I also had a chance to sit in on Ander’s LINQ overview talk which went really well and included Visual Basic demo of LINQ. While he didn’t actually type “Dim” on stage, you know he had to have typed it sometime to author the demo. (I’ve actually seen him type “Dim” – one of the benefits of being on the inside.)

So, just a reminder for tomorrow (Thursday), if you’re interested in VB futures, DO NOT MISS: