Wow, its been awhile since I posted anything.  And what a post I get to make.  This will be my last entry under the topic of being a Software Engineer.  At least for the foreseeable future.  I am now officially a Program Manager for Microsoft.  I plan to keep blogging here, but I may focus more on the personal side of things and let any professional content go to my new MSDN blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jeremykelley  I'll try and get something started over there soon.  I can't imagine I have that big an audience that this news will mean anything to, but it may give me enough reason to try and get my website upgraded to the latest version of DotNetNuke, it won't matter as much if I break everything.

-Jeremy

Robert Scoble is performing an interesting experiment to track the various search engines out there.  The test is simple, convince a bunch of people to put the same wacky string into a blog post.  In this case the string is: brrrreeeport  By participating in this I don't know if that makes me a real part of the blogosphere or just another bored engineer who doesn't mind being a lab rat.  Either way this should be an interesting test.

-Jeremy

I knew way back in high school that I was going to end up being a software engineer.  I had a pretty good aptitude for computers and I enjoyed playing around in Pascal and learning C++.  I was pretty far ahead of a lot of people in my early programming classes, although WAY behind my really smart friends. 

When it came time to start picking colleges it was getting a little rough.  My grades in school were not what they should have been.  And it was my own fault.  But it was starting to limit my choices of where I thought I could go.  It came down to going to a state school in another state for Creative Writing, or going to the Rochester Institute of Technology to study Computer Science.  Thankfully I got in to RIT.

So what's the point of all this?  I love being a software engineer.  Designing architectures, learning new technologies, writing code.  I enjoy every ...

So I asked someone what may have been a dumb question.  Dumb only because I didn't exhaust my resources on my own before asking.  Since I get frustrated when people do it to me I figure I owe it to the person I asked to get the info out there in another spot just in case someone reading over here is interested.

The question at hand was about good sources for interviewing tips.  The big mistake I made was not fully reading the website of the person I was asking the question of.  In this case I got lazy, I forgot that looking at the latest posts in Bloglines doesn't show all the other important content on the site.

Today's site in question: http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog  The team over there provide a TON of information about all aspects of recruiting, and specifically interviewing.  Gretchen (of the afore mentioned JobsBlog)  ...

After a very long week the PDC has finally come to an end.  I just finished seeing the last presentation of the day, a session on the architecture of the Windows Presentation Foundation.  It was very cool, Chris Anderson gave a good overview of how everything works with some good support from his team.

Final thoughts to come later...

Final day of the conference is off to a bang.  Really cool presentation on typography and document support in WPF.  Un-f'ing believable what's being made available in the platform.

Then, the big moment, I got to personally meet Don Box for a few minutes.  Do the usual bowing down and salivating that us geeks do.  (Respectfully of course).  The best part, he even told me to e-mail him to get in touch with someone about coming in on his team!  I realize that's probably a hand-off and it doesn't mean anything, but still it was a very cool moment from someone like that. 

Now I'm headed off to see Chris Sells presenting on tying Avalon and Indigo together.  Should be cool.  Unfortunately his new book (co-authored with Ian Griffiths, I hope I spelled his name right, he's a very cool guy) is all reserved up so I probably won't get a copy!  D'oh!  Just have to g ...

Okay, the day rumbles on...  I saw Raymond Chen this morning, he gave a great talk about various pitfalls to avoid in Win32 programming.  It was nice to have some real tangible information to take away from all this. 

After that was a talk about the new aero guidelines for Windows Vista.  The focus is really on creating USABLE and FRIENDLY applications for this next generation of apps.  Simple things like moving away from using computer jargon coupled with the hardcore stuff like supporting high dpi monitors are going to make the new apps great.

I've been getting my final fill of the main expo hall since then, talking to various MS people.

The Channel 9 event was insane!  I'll post pictures once I'm home.  They were giving out t-shirts and it was a madhouse.  I don't think most of the people even knew what Channel 9 was but it was very cool.  ...

Okay, so its getting hard to keep up with everything and keep blogging.  Its especially difficult without a laptop or tablet PC to write on during sessions.  So I'll try to remember yesterday's highlights...

Eric Rudder and Steven Sinofsky's presentations in the general session were great!  We finally got to see all the tools we'll get to use to build the spiffy XAML based apps we've been seeing all week.  So far everyone has been either writing XAML by hand or using C# to create the cool stuff.  Which is still cool, but seeing the tools was really nice.

I attended a session on graphics in Vista / WinFX and saw some really cool stuff.  The highlight was seeing a mesh, deformed with a cloth simulation, with a video playing on it!  The video even deformed with the mesh.  Very slick.

I also sat in two Direct3D sessions.  The first was an overview of the ar ...

Well the first official day of the PDC is over.  Bill Gates got his freak on in a video with Napoleon Dynamite himself.  It was probably the highlight of his talk to be honest.  He's interesting to listen to but I imagine I wouldn't need to see another of his speeches, at least not right away.  He's certainly smart and engaging, but he's very much a guy who will talk about the high level vision rather than all the nitty gritty details.  At least at an event like this.

Most of the talks I went to later in the day were based around applications shown off during the keynotes.  The WPF stuff looks interesting but I'll need to see it with the development tools to know whether it will really break on through.

Atlas is pretty slick if you're into web programming.  They pulled out Macs TWICE today to show Safari running Atlas applications.

I'm still waiting for this to live up to the hyp ...