::: {.Section1} [They have these special presentations in the press room in which certain topics are presented to a group vastly smaller than the general sessions. Generally, these are pretty mellow. At one this afternoon, though, the press made it clear that they are very skeptical that the Avalon / Windows Presentation …

::: {.Section1} [It’s my understanding that this is the RC of VS2005, but Sam Gentile is the first place I actually saw someone else use the phrase…]{style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"} :::

::: {.Section1} [At yesterday’s keynote Allchin demonstrated a forthcoming capability that allows a Flash-RAM memory stick to be used for system memory. Tom Murphy pointed out the killer application for this capability: “gen up VPC images that could just boot on install.  You would jack in the memory, it would …

::: {.Section1} [Check it out: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=linq\< ?xml:namespace prefix = o /> ]{style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"} :::

::: {.Section1} [Yesterday belonged to LINQ, today belongs to Workflow. This is a new namespace / API within WinFX that provides a fundamental atom of [Activity]{style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold"}. An [Activity ]{style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold"}\< ?xml:namespace prefix = o />can be:]{style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"}

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::: {.Section1} [Very much enjoyed Joe Duffy and Joel Pobar’s session on “Build a compiler for managed code in less than an hour.” Basically, they stepped through the classic compiler stages (scanner, parser, code gen), but then went into how, in the .NET world, the System.Reflection.Emit libraries work …

::: {.Section1} [WPF/E was also shown at the PDC. This is a XAML + JavaScript (!) solution for delivering Avalon-like graphics on devices. I’m scanning the catalog to see if there are classes available on this, which seems like a startlingly odd combination of technologies.]{style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial …

::: {.Section1} [According to Bill Gates, 200 million PCs were shipped last year (are going to be shipped this year?). +12% growth. This builds into the point that in the few years after Vista ships, 500 million PCs will be purchases, 200 million of which will be “capable of being upgraded …

::: {.Section1} [Superfetch is Vista ’s an enhancement to the virtual memory manager that handles the swapping of application RAM in and off the disk. Superfetch looks like a good idea, it basically seems to look at usage patterns over time and use this knowledge to pre-cache the most commonly-used DLLs …

::: {.Section1} [Microsoft showed Office 12 for the first time in public during the keynotes. The most obvious thing is that they’ve gotten rid of dropdown menus; choosing a high-level menu now puts a taskbar in a tabbed interface (I think is how it works – it was difficult to comprehend …