So, it’s Monday evening (21st February,2005). I want to go a friend’s house for our regular Monday night get-together. But before I go I should tell you a bit about our first Route64 event which just took place in Redmond, Wasington.
It was a great success! One comment we got was “these training sessions set the standards to what all Microsoft training events should strive for”! If that doesn’t irritate the hell out of some hardworking MS trainers out there I will eat my hat! Other comments were “Mind-blowing” and “WOW!”. As you can imagine we are more than a little pleased. Though I can’t help wondering if someone slipped something into the lunch boxes we gave them during the event…
All joking aside, it was great to see some real world applications being ported. It was also encouraging to see people making progress during the only three days of the event.
One of the original programmers of Autocad was there with his new product and, with the help of the instruction that he received during the training, managed to port his entire application to the x64 servers by the end of the second day. Some alignment problems slowed down the port to the Itaniums. Visual Studio couldn’t debug the peculiar problem that we were getting - not sure why – but we got a closer look with the help of the native 64-bit compiler WinDBG. Although the port to the Itanium was not completed by the end of the third day this attendee went home a very happy customer.
Another attendee was quite surprised to see so many warnings about the standard printf() functions. The warning said that these functions were deprecated! What’s going on he wanted to know – is Microsoft deprecating standard C now? Well, in a nutshell, the answer is “Yes“. But they are getting a lot of support for these efforts. I will write something on this shortly - watch this space.
Other noteworthy revelations from this event? How about free ice cream hidden in the small kitchen beside the “Thunder” conference room? It seems that there has been a refrigerator there for a year or two – well I never saw it before – it was so well hidden. Only accessible by those privileged few who knew where to look! Terrible elitism I call it. Snobbery in fact. Having said that, I am not giving any more information about how to find it – lest it all be gone the next time I look for my favorite sweet, icey, sugary snack...