Spent the day at the LA convention center attending the pre PDC workshop ‘Windows 7 Boot camp’. Online this workshop was listed as Sold Out, but the auditorium was really less than half full. Not sure if that is because people signed up for this free workshop and then were’t concerned about dropping out later, or if the presentation was moved to a larger room due the number of responses.

The morning session from 10am to Noon covered some of the under-the-hood features that are not surfaced as whizzy features, but every user will appreciate as they use their computer in a regular way. I’m talking about the performance improvements and the two main areas that were discussed were the kernel scheduler and the memory manager. Whilst I will hopefully never have to fully understand the intricacies of this work, the presentation left me thinking that I am very thankful for it having been done. The two presenters (a Microsoft Principal Architect, and a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer) delivered extremely good presentations which showed why they have achieved the positions they have. The work that they have done is complex and I can only imagine the team effort that was involved in design, implementation and testing. If I was wearing a hat I would take it off to those guys!

Lunch was provided in an enormous hall that was set up to hold all the conference attendees once it gets fully underway tomorrow. I’m guessing there was space for over 2000 lunchers, although for the pre-conference there was probably only 900 or so. Still, it was a vast space and very well organized – let’s see how they do when the crowd arrives tomorrow.

The afternoon sessions dealt with features that regular users can actually touch and feel, and included the ‘Task Bar’, Multi-touch features, DirectX graphics, Sensor aware API, and ended with a presentation of each of the 7 winners of the Code 7 Challenge – each entry had to demonstrate an application where some of the new Windows 7 features were used. My favorite was a game similar to War Craft, but where the armies were controlled by multi-touch gestures and a paint brush. This looked really cool.

During the afternoon I went to get EdgeRater logo certified for Windows 7, and have to wait now to find out the results – apparently a Click Once application such as EdgeRater already passes most of the requirements due to the Click Once deployment technology taking care of installation.

So, day 1 is complete, now must brave the hoards for the next few days before heading to Vegas for the Las Vegas Trader’s Expo.