Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Neither marypcb or I have been posting much recently, due to being incredibly busy. We're technically having a couple of days off between conferences at the moment, but we're actually holed up in a motel room writing articles on Windows 7.

Last week we were at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. It promised to be an important event, and we certainly got a lot of information in a very short time. Even though we had early access to Windows 7 (and a couple of laptops to run it on), we had a pile of commissions waiting for us to have the code. The result was that we had about 36 hours to write around 8000 words of copy. Various other pieces and techblog entries during the week took that to a round 10K words or so, not counting this weekend's work, which should round things off at a hefty 16 or 17,000 words in less than a week.


Steve Sinofsky unveiling Windows 7

PDC2008 was a fascinating event, and we had great fun talking to new people and learning about new technologies. A Surface-based scavenger hunt gave us something to do in the occasional breaks, and we also managed to spend time with old friends we rarely see.

Here's a round up of what we've written so far:

• At Tom's Guide, we produced a 20 screenshot walkthrough the new Windows.


• At ZDNet UK, the result was a 10 screen walkthrough and a hefty first look article.


• At TechRadar there are keynote reports from the first two days of PDC2008, for the Windows Azure launch and for Windows 7, along with a look at Windows 7 and a piece on Microsoft Research.


• At IT Pro, there's a piece on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, as well as a set of blog posts on Microsoft's identity strategy and an interesting feature in Windows 7.


• And just to round things up here's marypcb's review of Windows 7 for the Financial Times.

Right, it's back to work. Our editors want their copy...

Aten't dead yet - though a 10K word sprint at the beginning of the week was, err, intensive.

I now know lots more than I did this time last week, which is all to the good, and puts me in a nice place at the start of an interesting year for the industry I write about about.

In the mean time, while I decompress and write yet another long piece on Windows 7, here's some seasonal photography.





Freddie Krueger welcomes visitors to a seasonal event at Universal's theme park.

An apt image for Halloween, I suspect. I found the mix of backlighting and smoke most effective, especially with the park's use of high-intensity sodium spots.

Los Angeles, California
October 2008