Microsoft PDC 1998 Travel Report +
David N. Blank-Edelman           |
Director of Technology           |
College of Computer Science      |
Northeastern University          |
November 1, 1998                 +

Here are some random impressions from my MS PDC98 trip:

o Last year I mentioned that the PDC began with the Talking Heads'
  song "Road to Nowhere." This year scheduling conflicts caused me to
  miss the opening of the conference and the keynote by Microsoft's
  second highest-paid employee. Instead of dwelling on what I missed,
  let me offer an anecdote from what I did experience on my trip to
  Denver:

  I tend to get nervous about the prospect of passing all of my data
  through an x-ray machine of unknown calibration. As a result, I
  usually ask for visual inspection of my laptop. Most of time this
  just consists of showing a random security guard a boot message or
  two. This time things were a bit different.

  As I hand my laptop over the gap between the X-ray machine and metal
  detector (no strong magnetic fields there!), the security guard asks
  "Is your laptop safe for the Year 2000?" 

  This question catches me off guard. I have a few milliseconds of
  panic. Question start to race through my mind: "Is this a new
  security precaution? Is he going to check my laptop for Y2K
  compliance? Am I going to have to set my clock forward right here at
  the security checkpoint? Did I install the NT hotfix on this
  machine? Will he notice the other OS's on the machine? What about
  the apps?" 

  After coming out of my frozen state, I stutter "uh, I think so."
  Luckily the security guard is just making polite conversation, and
  I'm waved through with a free adrenaline rush courtesy of United
  Airlines. I didn't even have to show that my laptop is not an
  explosive device (or at the very least is an explosive device that
  can boot to an OS).

o This particular PDC was considerably less interesting for me than
  last year. Here's why:

  - "3/4 parade syndrome" - Many moons ago when I was in high school I
    participated in both school band and a fife and drum corps (as a
    drummer). I have marched in more parades than I care to
    remember. The folks at Microsoft, perhaps up to a year away from
    the release of NT 5.0, reminded me of how we used to look about
    3/4 of the way into your average parade route. They are too far
    along to announce much new and exciting, and too far from the end
    to really get excited about actually putting the product in
    customers' eager hands.

    Teaching folks how to use a non-feature-complete beta product is a
    tricky thing. It is also easier to teach people how to program an
    upcoming product than it is how to administer this product because
    a set of API's have been published. Showing them how to administer
    a product which has yet to deployed is a great deal harder because
    the sysadmin discipline is one often based on learning from
    experience. It is hard to provide a list of "best practices"
    without having any practice.

    Finally, there was also a bit of the Wizard of Oz in reference to
    prying ship dates for NT5, IE5, etc from MS. "Nobody can know the
    ship dates. No dates, no how!"

  - "ZAW was last year" - Last year was "MS sees the light. We need to
    deal with administration! Everyone pay attention to this subject!"
    This year system administration stuff was covered in a track, but
    it wasn't as ascendent as last year. See the previous bullet, the
    information here wasn't particularly new.

  - "physical layout" - It appears that the conference maxed out the
    physical capacity of the Denver conference center. To accommodate,
    two tracks took place mostly in a theater hidden away a block or
    two from the main center. Too much trudging. 

o Laptop power on airplanes is an absolute crock. I was hoping not to
  have to carry as many Lithium ions as usual on to the plane. The
  travel agent said that the planes I was traveling on supposedly had
  power on certain rows, and I believed it. This was sheer naiveness
  on my part. I found:

  - agents at ticket counters/departure gates have no clue when you
    talk to them about which seats have power. I estimate a less than
    one-in-ten ratio of air carrier staff who know about this subject
    to those who don't.
  - finding out which planes have power is not available on-line
    anywhere I could find. Travel agents seem to be the only folks who
    can consistently get this info (and even then, one said she has to
    call the airline directly and the info is often wrong).
  - very new airplanes (777's, maybe 757's) probably have power, don't
    expect it on anything else. I spoke with a few pilots who said
    they had never seen it on the planes I traveled on (Airbus, 737).

  Grrr.

o If I had to point to a single religion that was being preached this
  year by the evangelists giving keynotes, it would probably be
  XML. Last year was "Active Directory," this year it was XML (though
  AD was still quite prominent). Both of their "gotta be on a desktop"
  products (Office and IE) are embracing XML in a large way. Having
  already been converted to the XML religion at the Perl conference, I
  didn't need any convincing.

  It is interesting to note that while MS is doing a reasonable job at
  holding itself to the XML standards, it is still pushing to the
  edges. For instance, MS is putting effort towards implementing
  standards-in-progress like XSL, rather than sticking to the
  well-known, mature DTD (Data Type Definition) realm. And we all
  know, he (or she) who implements the standard first in a widely
  distributed consumer product... (e.g. see Netscape's effect on
  HTML). It's an interesting strategy for standards track control.

  As a side note on this issue, I was surprised, given the emphasis
  placed on the technology during the keynotes, how physical
  infrastructure was not allocated accordingly. The XML sessions took
  place in totally packed standard conference rooms. At one point one
  of the the hallways was crammed with people trying to get into an
  XML session. You would have thought Elvis was teaching the session
  (<elvis>left the building</elvis>).

o Other key pushes (new):
   - SQL 7.0. get it, love it, use it
   - WinCE. Had a whole session track and an amazing number of device
     makers present at the show. The new 2.1 device (clamshell
     rotating into tablet) is definitely cool.

o Key pushes (old):
   - DHTML
   - 3-tiered apps
   - NT 5.0, err, Windows 2000 (is that anything like Space:1999?)

o I think Active Directory will probably be the MS technology which
  will affect system administrators the most in the coming years (and
  will persist the longest). I chose to attend these sessions (even
  over those on the Microsoft Management Console, which I suspect is a
  very first generation interface which will quickly be superseded). 
  
  I experienced a pleasant sense of familiarity while listening to the
  AD programming talks because it sounded so familiar (by design) to
  all of the LDAP background I have been trying to acquire. Sysadmins
  who are interested in AD should take the time to go after the
  vanilla LDAP stuff, it will pay off in the future when AD arrives in
  their environment.

o It was somewhat surprising to find an Interoperability track in the
  session list. Granted, it was the smallest track, but it was an
  interesting development.

o For the first time this year they had something known as PDC-TV. A
  few select sessions of the PDC were broadcast on all of the the
  conference hotels' closed loop TV channels. In general, I think this
  is a really good idea, but it was kind of eerie to come back to your
  hotel room only to find that the PDC was still going on there too. I
  wonder what the non-PDC folks staying at the hotel thought. You can
  just imagine the traveling salesman in the room saying "Hmm, porn or
  PDC, porn or PDC?"

o Also for the first time, I found a hotel that planned ahead to have
  its outgoing lines jammed by modem users at a technical
  conference. The place I was staying at had had the foresight to
  install 20 separate outgoing lines in one of their ballrooms for
  conference users. I didn't have a problem getting out, but I
  appreciate the effort.

o I have a couple of minor qualms with the keynote presentations:
  - bad English - I'm not trying to be William Safire here, but who at
    MS decided that "remoted" was a real verb, or even a real word?
    ("Yes, last year we remoted our grandparents to Florida"). That's
    just one example of several which made me cringe.
  - bad drama - Some of the demos during the keynote were done in bad
    infomercial style (i.e. phony dialogue):
        "So you're telling me that I've remoted that object to another
        machine?"  
        "Why, yes, Bill. With just the click of a button!"
        "Wow, that's really exciting." 

o The evening entertainment was excellent. I thought Penn & Teller's
  cynicism was a perfect counterbalance to the rest of the
  conference. The pre-entertainment was a little more tricky. Let's
  just say that "an authentic western barbecue in the bottom of a
  civic center basement complete with guys in chaps carrying lassos"
  is a very scary thing to this New England vegetarian academic
  liberal. Brrrr.

o I found the "communications network" (i.e. the public terminals) to
  be really useful this year. Having the slides for all of the
  sessions (minus the keynotes, a bad omission) available was great.

o Last year it felt like Java had large presence at the PDC (if just
  as a big quick question mark hanging in the air). This year I really
  didn't notice it at all.

So, that's my report for PDC98. For closure's sake, let me leave you
with my story from departing Denver:

I'm running late for my plane, and I'm not exactly sure I'm going to
make it. I pass by the initial security check (sans Y2K issues) with
no problem, but then a security guard pulls me out of the
post-checkpoint line and asks "Do you mind if we do a secondary
investigation on your bags?" I've never heard of such a thing, so I
say "Hey, I've got a good five or ten minutes before I miss my plane,
knock yourself out." He tells me that he's going to use (and I'm not
making this up) "their electronic-bomb-sniffing dog." Now my curiosity
is peaked, and I ask permission to watch the whole procedure. 

We head over to a table on the side and he swabs the hinges of my bag
with a sample-paper wand of some sort. The paper gets removed from the
wand and placed into a squat, squarish looking machine with a small
LCD panel, not unlike something you'd see used to count red blood
cells in a medical lab.

Uh oh, there's a glitch, something's wrong with the dog. The security
guard wrinkles his forehead and pushes a few buttons trying to get it
to function properly. He thinks maybe it has to warm up or be
calibrated, but he's not sure. He's waving me on, but now my sysadmin
reflexes take over and I'm starting to feel a vested interest in
getting the box to work. I go though a few seconds of "Fix the Dog
or Catch the Plane?  Fix the Dog or Catch the Plane?" until I come to
my senses. Leaving e-Fido in the dust, I speed over to my gate and
hop on board. I know where I want to go today, and that's home