The second session I attended today was Tablet PC Database Development, given by Billy Hollis. He gave us some good tips for storing ink [data] in a database and for searching it and searching for it. His was the only session I attended in the two days I was here that showed source code in VB [for whatever that’s worth..].
My choice for the third session was Introduction to Auxiliary Displays in Longhorn; not a great choice, grasshopper. (C’est la vie!). Content was ok, but the PPT was awful (way too many slides that were all text; more pretty pictures please or less slides – or both!… or be like Petzold – two slides only (IIRC). Additionally, I wasn’t partial to this speaker’s style*. Regardless of some of the info I point out below, I think this will be a useful feature. Some tidbits:
- Aux. display (on laptop/Mobile PC) will run the same tiny runtime that SPOT uses. nifty!
- Aux. display on another device (Smartphone, for example, will run with that platform)
- APIs? : C++ COM. WTF?!?! This is frelling Longhorn!!! COM?!? … apparently COM is still quite alive in Longhorn. *sigh*
- Initial thoughts for the displays themselves (again, on a Mobile PC) are 24–bit color, quite similar to that of the mobile phone you are using today.
Instead of the auxiliary display session, I should have picked Advanced Tablet PC Development Topics with Shawn Van Ness of Leszynski Group Inc. These guys rock! (check out some of their downloads for Tablet PC). My first exposure the Leszynski Group was at the Tablet PC launch events in Cincinnati, OH and Columbus, OH. This was back when I was with G.A. Sullivan; our booth was next to theirs and we did break-out sessions before/after one another (for these two cities, I gave a technical break-out session featuring an insurance claims application that GAS wrote which showcased Tablet technology). I chatted with the guy a bit – smart guy, smart products. I’m definitely going to have to pull down Shawn’s slide deck.. and kick myself in the ***.
For the 3:15 slot, I selected Building Note Taking Functionality into Your Applications. Stimpy, you iiiidiiot! so.. this session featured someone from Agilix talking about their InfiNotes controls (standard edition – free, professional edition – not free). Maybe I was just too tired to enjoy this one, but I found myself nodding off repeatedly. So yeah, I was tired; however, I also found the speaker to be a bit, um, dry*. Seeing through that though, Agilix has a pretty nifty control – check it out. :-)
4:30.. final session.. I picked Smart Client. Hmm.. this one was a little bit mis-labelled, too. It should have been called “Using VSTO 2005 with Smart Client Applications” as it was all VSTO. Now, with that said, BJ Holtgrewe did a really good job (IMO), and I got some insight into VSTO (something I’d never really thought much about). These guys are doing some cool stuff! Check out this MSDN article on VSTO 2005.
One scenario that is particularly compelling is leveraging the data caching functionality to read and write to the data islands inside of a document without starting up Word or Excel. Very advantageous on the server! (I can think of discussions I’ve had with TomB, MikeLe, MikeWo, and a few others about putting Word on the server.. gentlemen: this rocks!) Check out blog post by Paul Cornell that talks a bit more about it.
-Nino
*Despite my opinions, positive or negative, of any speaker at this event, I give them kudos for getting up there and speaking. I’ve done a little speaking before – a handful of UG presentations, the aforementioned Tablet PC launch sessions. I know it can be a little …challenging (especially for an introvert like me).
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