Being at the PDC has been a blast, but a bit overwhelming. There is so much to see and so many people to meet. I have come away from the first few days with a couple of observations:

• WinFS truly is revolutionary as a file system. I will hold my breath to see if they can make it perform well enough though. In the current bits given out at the PDC, security hasn’t been enabled yet so there probably needs to be a great effort in tuning it before it ships.
• Avalong is really cool for a UI. Sleek and sexy. I do have a concern that since it is using the GPU in a machine that Laptops and Tablets will lose battery life faster than before. I can only hope that the GPU’s are much more power efficient or Fuel Cell Batteries exist by 2006 when Longhorn ships.
• You should always make sure the sound guys don’t suck when you’re renting a PA for a band. I played with the INETA All-Stars at the end of the “Ask the Experts” session. And while it was fun, the sound company turned off the PA’s (leaving only the monitors live) and we didn’t get it fixed until the last song.
• ObjectSpaces will be a real boon to productivity, but it may be at the expense of performance tuning IMHO.
• OPath (used in WinFS and ObjectSpaces) is an unnecessary new search language. I just wish they had figured out a way to use XQuery or XPath since both of those languages would have uses outside the ObjectSpaces technology.
• Bill Gates really needs to let us get ours hands on that “Behind the Techonology” video from the Keynote

Till tomorrow…