PDC 3rd day
The day wasn’t as cool as the 2nd day. BizTalk was pretty nice, memory management was okay and C# Generics was a push!
The funniest thing happened in the last session when they announced that they’ll be giving away X-Boxes and return tickets to *developers* as a gift or whatever through a raffle-draw. Firstly, we’re developers! It would have been much nicer to have received a VS.NET 2003 original copy or something instead of a X-Box or a Dubai return trip. Moreover, the raffle draw idea was totally sick! Come on, 1500 developers around and all Microsoft people couldn’t devise a simple program to do a randomized draw through PC! Almost half the crowd would make such a simple program in just 10 minutes right there! They had PCs connected to the large projectors, that was not an issue.
It was a bit disappointing, really!
Farrukh Mahmood said,
June 18, 2004 @ 12:16 pm
Well to give away prizes at the end of any ceremony like PDC is now becoming a practice. To give X-Boxes or VS.NET or so are not a big issue for company like Microsoft. You cannot compare the product VS.NET with X-Box in any respect as both are totally different from each other. Its true that it is a developers conference and the prizes that are not mentioned or committed in the registration agreement are more than what we had paid for this conference. I think Microsoft take this event to throw away some Ex-X Boxes present in their Ex-Stock and it is the best way to do so. The other prizes like tickets etc. are not sponsored by Microsoft as mentioned in the closing ceremony. And they are not more than Heaven to visit Dubai/Islamabad just in 800 or 1200 Rs. Aren’t u ready to go there if your PDC ID wins for that? Well thanks to Mr. Ishrat Hussain to do such a random draw as it is not possible to generate a true random number by software programming as mentioned by RAFAL in his Security and Cryptograpy Session? Have u attended that? Well i thought all the days are exciting at PDC 2004 as on every day we are far ahead of knowledge and information by the well known and great speakers who travelled far alot just for this event even in these critical days of Karachi as far as law ‘n order situtation is concerned and don’t have any problem for querying them alot even for our personal software programming issues and copying the slides on the USB drives whenever required. Personlly i enjoyed this managed event very much especially the graceful and funny closing ceremony of PDC 2004!
Faisal Nasim said,
June 18, 2004 @ 12:37 pm
The question is why’d they give away plane tickets to developers? Surely, professionals wouldn’t want to take time off their jobs to enjoy a 2 day trip at Serena, Islamabad. You cannot generate a truely random number, alright… that is a a well known fact but they are many ways to make it approximately random if you’ve seen the entropy gathering daemon working on linux or tried generating a SSL cert through command line. I was hoping they’d show the source code there for the developers and then do that random draw right through the computer!
The problem with that kind of draw was that I didn’t even know if my number was in that box or not. Can you believe that a number came out twice? People had probably left or something… or maybe they didn’t attend. They did more draws and the same number came out again. Woosh! Tell that to my probablity and stats teacher.
It was really a pretty cool event! Few speakers weren’t really up to the mark. Speakers like Mr. Rafal stole the show! I’m running my local LAN on IPv6 already!
Faisal Nasim said,
June 18, 2004 @ 1:02 pm
By the way, my idea of Heaven trip is a trip from my university to my home (it turns to a Hell-trip is there is no electricity!). I’ve been to the far-side of the world! Just human, whatever environment… I’ll adapt! Well, that makes me a Borg doesn’t it? :p