Vendor Reception and Meet the Teams

The vendor reception was set up with a variety of food buffets scattered around the exhibit hall. Not a bad idea, except that the room is barely large enough to hold the exhibits, let alone food and diners. The food was mediocre, though not as bad as the cheap sheet pizza they've had for this event the last two years. The desserts were great!

I can't really say the same for the Meet the Teams. Last year, they did the Delphi team as a casual, science-fair layout. You could visit with any of the groups within the Delphi team in a casual forum. They tried it this year for all the teams, but they did it in a relatively small room (smaller than the exhibit hall, with a lower ceiling), so it was very noisy. And, we were all standing, so there was no way to stay comfortable.

I did get to ask Randy to clarify a couple of things. First, they do have a WinForms client, and they seriously thought about releasing it this year. However, they determined that it would be too confusing to have three different clients for Windows, so the elected to hold it back. He said they'd revisit that when they retire the Win32 client, based on how good the CPC looks when it finally has all the features of the Win32 client.

We also talked about using .NET for Alternate Property Editors. That's in the works, but even better, they've already got an implementation for faster APE display now, without the form server. For simple workflows that don't need a lot of heavy logic or external calls, you can design your workflow in an XML based format, and the client can render from that source. This is the same technology that the Web client uses.