Can you tell I brought a camera this time?

(Ok, total aside here. I get back to my room after the opening party, and what does NBC have on? The Perfect Storm. Is it just me, or is that just wrong given recent meteorological happenings?)

Tom and I headed over to the convention center about a half hour before the show starts, and the place is a ghost town. By this point last year, it was packed. So, we sit down and have a snack. A friend I met last year, Ben Hayat, comes by. He echoes my concerns, "Where is everybody?" Ben pointed out that there wasn't going to be the same number of product launches this year and that this wasn't a PDC followup. Fair enough. We discussed some of the shiny new things we were looking forward to in VS2005, especially Click-Once.

So, about 5 minutes before the start, a crowd materializes out of thin air. I swear I didn't see them come in. It's still a smaller crowd than last year, but it's certainly a quorum. The doors open, and we walk into what can be described only as one of those 1337 assembly demos. Various ambient and techno songs and shiny 3d imagery filled the room. As the start time passed, the music shifted to Blue Man Group, which improved my mood greatly. Tom, on the other hand, still had a plugged-up ear from the flying and was having trouble hearing anything but bass.

So, the room crew tried to get the crowd going with Your Attention Please by BMG. Then, David I stirred it up a little more with It's Time to Start. (I may have the wrong titles. Check the BMG album "The Complex".) When he got on stage, he was (unexpectedly, by his account) joined by two dancers in red foil wigs and platform shoes. (My only pictures were really blurry.) These people have way too much fun thinking this stuff up.

The theme for this year is "Software Delivery Optimization", a theory the CEO of Borland describes as "ERP for Software Development". As soon as I figure out what the hell he meant, I'll let you know. The big new toy at the show this year is Delphi "DiamondBack", the next version. And this time, they really, truly swear that there will be a new Win32 compiler this time. They showed a brief video of DiamondBack, but the launch is tomorrow night and the text in the video was so blurry that it was illegible, even on the huge projection screens.

The new CTO, Pat Kerpan, showed off some concept work of the "Developer Dashboard." Some of the highlights:

• Chat avatars that change "mood" based on that person's current ratio of open to fixed CRs.
• Audio-based cues to code quality. Run a static analyzer against the code, take the results, and feed them to a music randomizer. The more problems, the more "off" your music sounds.
• Ambient Orbs (or their onscreen equivalent) to represent current project status.

That was the shiny stuff. The awards followed, most notably the announcement of a $1 Million gift to Carnegie Mellon.

Then, Dale Fuller started firing t-shirts into the crowd with his air cannon, at which point we darted over to the welcome reception. It was pretty similar to last year. Video games, air hockey (Tom's an animal, and has the bruises to prove it!), foosball, and gaming tables. Along with the meal tickets was a 500 chip ticket, so I played some poker hands. Got down to 50 chips, went all in with A-c 9-c, and (as Dr. Sherman would say) lo-damn-and-behold, 3 clubs on the flop. Took 250 with that hand and cashed in for the impending raffle. No win for me though, so I headed back to the hotel so I could share my exciting evening with my loyal fans :-)

And yes Payne, that roast beef was really tasty.