Woke up late again, so I missed breakfast at the hotel and at the show. While on our way to the PDC we saw a show being shot a few blocks away from our hotel. The dude from McGiver was on the set. The bus driver told us everything we wanted to know about McGiver.

PDC

Pretty good talk from Jim on the internals of the CLR, I took various notes on his talk that I will share later on the Mono list.

Someone asked about .NET on Unix and C# on Unix and Jim pointed to the shared source non-commercial implementation that Microsoft will be releasing and also mentioned Mono.

Various people approached me after the talk to ask more about Mono. There was a lot of interest on .NET for Unix.

I had lunch afterwards with various people interested in alternate implementations of the CLI and C# afterwards (Sam Ruby had lunch with us as well). It is always good to see Sam again, a very pragmatic guy, and also enthusiastic about C# and the CLI (he particularly likes the metadata).

Ask-The-Experts

In the late afternoon there was a large get together of people in the "Ask the Experts" hall. This has to be one of the best ideas of the show, basically there are various workgroups organized in tables with the various topics about .NET. It is easy to find the group you are interested in, and have a nice talk with them.

I had a chance to meet Anders and enjoyed listening to the answers he gave to the various questions that people asked him. His comments were very interesting, as he shows definetly a sign of good taste in language design. For example, regarding the lack of exception checking in C# his answer was along the lines of: none of the current approaches really have proved to work or are too cumbersome. When we find a good way of implementing that, we will.

Learned also that foreach (X i in SomeArray) is translated by the C# compiler into for (X i = SomeArray.LowBoundary; i <= SomeArray.UpperBoundary; i++), which turns out to be pretty cool as it generates code that is as efficient as it can be.

I also ran into Dick Hardt which is a combination of a hacker and a businessman. Passionate about technology, and also interested in widening the use of Perl and Python in the windows world. He introduced me to some of the programmers at Active State and Ian who has been working on making Perl expose .NET components and consume .NET components.

Don Box is a pretty cool dude. He is the only hacker I have outside the GNOME world that uses the word "dude". His new book is about .NET. A preview of the first two chapters of the book were distributed at the show.

His new book is `a thousand times better written than the Essential COM book'. It was pretty funny that he told us `The Moniker section on the Essential COM book is the part I like the least; That and the first chapter of Essential XML'. So honest and so funny.

Don apparently loves Barcelona.

Jim Miller and David Stutz was extermely busy fielding a bunch of questions on the CLR, C# and ECMA.

I was so tired and had so much wine, that I went back to the hotel afterwards (and got to discuss the GPL, american ideology and the war with Frank).