Over at Canadian Developer Connection, we’ve got one more video from PDC in which Yours Truly conducted the interview: it’s with Jeff Atwood, the guy behind the blog Coding Horror and co-creator of Stack Overflow. It’s a brief interview; there were many people who wanted a slice of Jeff’s time, and we were lucky to even be able to buttonhole for as long as we did.

We’ll catch up for beers and Rock Band soon, Jeff!

Links

• Video interview with Jeff Atwood
• Stack Overflow
• Coding Horror
• Where the name “Coding Horror” came from

Interview with Chris Slemp, MSDN

Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.

Click here to watch the video.

“Grim Fandango’s” Puzzle Document

If you’re looking to get into the mind of a game designer and the design of one of the most highly-regarded computer adventures games, be sure to check out the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document. Tim Schafer, in “a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia,” decided to put the game’s puzzle design document online in PDF form (it’s 2.3MB in size).

Here’s a great summary of the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document, written by Andy Geers:

I use that word "crafted" because that’s exactly what this newly released document shows: true craftsmanship. We see the incredible attention to detail, the pacing of the narrative as it builds and as the puzzles get increasingly sophisticated, always coaxing the player along with them. As somebody whose spent the last few years trying to write my own adventure game, what struck me most about this document is the sheer simplicity of it – it’s well established that it takes a great deal of clarity and hard work to boil down something so vast as Grim Fandango into such a simple representation that conveys so much information in such a succinct way.

It’s a considerably more interesting read than most specs.

My Job-Related Reading List

Nothing gives you that frozen-caveman-thawed-in-modern-times feeling like returning to a software platform after not developing in it in seven years. Getting back into the swing of Microsoft’s development tools has been fun so far, but it is, as a lot of people have told me, like drinking from the firehose.

To quickly get acclimated with C#, ASP.NET and XNA, I’m expensing the following books I bought today:

• Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen
• Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader
• Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming by Alexandre Santos Lobao, Bruno Pereira Evangelista, and Jose Antonio Leal de Farias

I’ll let you know what I think of these books as I read them.

“Zero Punctuation” Reviews

And finally, a couple of reviews from my all-time favourite game reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. The first one’s for Saints Row 2, which includes a great argument for why it might actually be a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV as well as a brilliant concept for a new game:

and here’s the latest review, for Dead Space, which he summarizes as “competent but bland”. Luckily, his review is anything but…

A number of people have asked me how many sessions I attended at last week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference; my answer was “I only attended the keynotes”. Since every session was recorded on video (with a split screen showing both presenter and presentation) and made available online, I decided to focus on what you can’t replicate outside the conference: getting to know people in the Windows developer community.

It’s standard procedure at Microsoft to assign “buddies” to new hires to help them get acclimated. I have the very good fortune of having John Bristowe as one of my buddies; not only is he a warm and friendly guy, but I also already know him (his sister Ashley and I went to Crazy Go Nuts University together). John’s big on podcasting and was very generous in sharing the interviewer’s chair; he let me do a lot of interviews as a way to both get podcasting practice and introduce myself to people in the Windows world. Thanks, John!

You’re going to need Silverlight to view these videos. If you’re rolling your eyes at the prospect of having to download yet another plugin, keep in mind that Silverlight is a pretty cool tool for writing rich internet apps, I’ll be covering it rather extensively soon, and it’s catching on. Besides, you can’t see the videos without it!

Don Box on My Joining the Dark Side, Demos, Oslo and M, Zombies and How to Pronounce “Azure”

Click the picture to see the video of the interview.

After introducing myself to Distinguished Engineer (yup, that’s really his title) Don Box as “Microsoft’s Newest Employee”, I told him about my coming to Microsoft from the F/OSS world and asked him to please tell me that I hadn’t made a tragic mistake and ruined my life by coming over to the Dark Side. We also talked about his preparation process for his keynote demo, the Oslo platform and the M programming platform, the proper way to pronounce “Azure” and whether or not Microsoft is ready for the zombie apocalypse.

Useful Don Box/Oslo Links

• Video of my interview with Don Box.
• Video of Don Box’s and David Langworthy’s PDC 2008 presentation, Oslo: The Language, which introduces the M programming language.
• Video of Don Box’s and Florian Voss’ PDC 2008 presentation, “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience.
• The Oslo site.
• If you’d like to read more about Oslo in Don’s own words, a good place to start is this entry in his blog.
• Don’s blog, Don Box’s Spoutlet.

Miguel de Icaza on Mono

Click the picture to see the video of the interview.

I had a great chat with Mono Project lead Miguel de Icaza about Mono, their answer to Silverlight, the number of people in the Mono Project and how you, as a Windows developer, can take Mono out for a spin. We also talked about how to pronounce “Azure”, and Miguel speculated that the name was a clever choice because the disagreement over its pronunciation is a great way to get people talking about it.

Useful Miguel de Icaza/Mono Links

• Video of my interview with Miguel de Icaza.
• Video of Miguel de Icaza’s PDC 2008 presentation, Mono and .NET.
• The Mono Project’s site.
• Miguel de Icaza’s blog.

John Lam on IronRuby

Click the picture to see the video of the interview.

It’s always good to catch up with Toronto-area guy turned Redmond guy and IronRuby creator John Lam. We had a quick chat about IronRuby and the current state of the project. In the interview, he reminds us that IronRuby is an open source project, talks about the Ruby standard implementation tests it’s currently passing and what to expect from IronRuby in the near future.

Useful John Lam/IronRuby Links

• Video of my interview with John Lam.
• Video of John Lam’s PDC 2008 presentation, IronRuby: The Right Language for the Right Job.
• The IronRuby site.
• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby — the most whimsical introduction to a programming language, ever!
• John Lam’s blog, John Lam on Software.

Phil Haack on ASP.NET MVC

Click the picture to see the video of the interview.

Phil Haack not only has the coolest surname for a techie, he’s also got an MVC framework for ASP.NET, just like the ones the Rails, Django and Cake people get to play with. In this interview, we talk about MVC web frameworks for the uninitiated, as well as get his take on how to pronounce “Azure”.

Useful Phil Haack/ASP.NET MVC Links

• Video of my interview with Phil Haack.
• Video of Phil Haack’s PDC 2008 presentation, ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications.
• The official ASP.NET MVC site.
• Phil Haack’s blog, You’ve Been HAACKED.

.NET Micro Framework

Click the picture to see the video of the interview.

Believe it or not, there’s a .NET framework for embedded devices, the .NET Micro Framework. In this interview, I learn about .NET programming for small devices, the “Dare to Dream Different” contest (where you can win great prizes for coming up with new applications for the .NET Micro Framework) and about what donuts have to do with microcontrollers. Mmm…donuts!

Useful .NET Micro Framework Links

• Video of my .NET Micro Framework interview.
• The “Dare to Dream Different” contest site.
• The .NET Micro Framework site.

Over on my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, I’ve got a long (but entertaining) review of the hotel I stayed at while attending the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference titled A Dump with a Future.

On Tuesday night, attendees of the PDC were treated to a night at the Universal Studios Hollywood amusement park, which was closed off to everyone but us. Everything was free: rides, food and drinks, and the park was dressed up for Hallowe’en, complete with horror movie characters including Freddy Krueger, skeletons and chainsaw-wielding zombies.

I’ll post more photos on the Accordion Guy blog later, but in the meantime, enjoy these photos featuring the new “Simpsons Ride”, which was very amusing. It’s one of those “ridefilms” or “simulator rides”, in which you’re placed in a ride car that seats 8 that gets jolted around in sync to an IMAX film. The basic plot:you’re trying out the new ride in “Krustyland” when suddenly, Sideshow Bob takes over the controls as an act of revenge, and hilarity ensues.

One of the best things about the ride is that they try to keep you entertained in line with…you guess it, Simpsons cartoons. These new cartoons were made specifically for the ride, feature a number of Simpsons characters and best of all, feature writing that’s a lot funnier and sharper than the show has been lately.

I’m meeting up with a lot of interesting new people and catching up with old friends and collegaues here at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Among the people I ran into was John Lam of the IronRuby project. This was the prefect opportunity for me to conduct my first podcast interview as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. I asked John to explain IronRuby to people who’d never heard of it and to give us a quick summary of the current state of the project.

My thanks to John Bristowe for suggesting that I conduct the interview and for doing the camera and post-production work!

This morning at the PDC keynote, one of the announcements made was about the online, web-based versions of the Office Apps we know and love: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. They look better than their Google Apps equivalents — so good that it’s quite hard to tell the web version from the desktop version. Take a look…

Word

Take a look at these two photos that I took at the keynote. Which one is the desktop Word and which one is the web Word?

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

The answer: The top one is the web version; the bottom one is the desktop version.

OneNote

Try the same thing again, this time as OneNote:

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

The answer: The top one is the desktop version; the bottom one is the web version.

Excel

One more time, with Excel:

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

Click the picture to see it on its Flickr page, where you can see it in larger sizes.

The answer: The top one is the desktop version; the bottom one is the web version.

Live Collaboration

One more thing: in the demo, they were running the web, desktop and phone versions simultaneously on the same document, with each user’s edits updating the other two’s versions. There are some great collaborative possibilities here.

Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.

One nice thing about PDC: there are plenty of free snacks, some of which are healthy, some of which, well, not so much…

Choose wisely, my geeky friends.

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I’m on my way to PDC2008. I expect to land at LAX at 11:00 Pacific and should be there for the afternoon sessions and evening hijinks. See you there!

No tech conference is complete without a Bingo Card, and I noticed that nobody’s made one for PDC yet! As a brand-new Microsoft Developer Evangelist who’s trying to make a splash during the three-month probationary period, I took matters into my own hands. Pictured below is the PDC2008 Bingo Card — simply fill out a square as you see or hear what’s described in the square at any point in the conference:

I would’ve make a “Keynote Bingo” card, but as someone still new to this particular scene, I haven’t been to a Microsoft conference in a very long time, and I don’t know what Ray Ozzie’s particular keynote mannerisms and speech patterns are. Hence this card, which is generalized to cover the entire conference and not just the keynotes.

Developer Evangelism is all about helping you make your own stuff, and conference bingo cards are no exception! Click here for a blank version of the PDC Bingo card where you can supply your own text. I recommend you use the “Segoe UI” font, which comes standard with Vista.

If you make your own bingo card and post it online, send me a link in the comments!

Credit Where Credit is Due

I can’t finish this post without mentioning my fellow evangelist (and tech training buddy) John Bristowe, who suggested I make a Bingo card for PDC. Thanks, John, and see you in L.A. tomorrow!