I finally found some time to write about the session I attended at the PDC, so without further ado day 1.

PDC Day 1 Keynotes from BillG and JimA.

I'm sure you’ve read all about this already, if you haven't: Early & Adopter have a great report.

MBL318 : CLR Under the covers: Implementing CLR for Smart Personal Objects Technology

A technology where requested information is pushed to a personal device (e.g. a watch), using radio signals. The devices are designed to be able to receive new pieces of (signed) software and install and use that without user intervention.

The biggest change to the CLR implementation that was done, was removing the JIT process and replace it with an IL interpreter, thus reducing the footprint and gaining control over the execution process. The Garbage collecting was revised from the standard generational GC to a more light weight "mark and sweep" method, including support for non-volatile storage. The non-volatile storage ensures the RAM survives crashes and reboots, coupled with a CRC routine to prevent corruption.

TLS350: XML in Office: Breaking the Mold for Document Concepts and Programming

Highlighted some of the new XML features in Office 2003.

• How to access to relevant business data in a document context, from a webservice.
• The advantages of storing data in structured documents, easier to reuse and data mine.
• Smart documents help to validate user input, using both schema validation, phone no. must look like ###-####, and business rule validation, customer must be in our database to order.
• Automated report generation, it's no longer required to install office on the server.

TLS347:Introducing MSBuild: The Universal Build Engine for Visual Studio "Whidbey" and “Longhorn"

MSBuild is the new build engine, build in VS Whidbey and shipped as part of the .Net v2 redistributable. This is also the build engine used by VS to build solutions, so finally it's possible to easily create a complete build environment without installing VS or writing big and complicated .bat files. The downside is, there always is a downside, they changed the project again.

According to Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart Microsoft will use this internally as well.