The world was at Defcon 1 DevCon 2006 yesterday. For the less geekish, it was a Microsoft Developer Conference for tertiary students. A copy of the agenda can be found here.

DevCon 2006 was akin to Microsoft’s Vista releases in several ways, most notably the shuffling and delays of the schedule. We arrived at about 0845h to beat the zerg but the registration wasn’t open until 0900h. Generous goodie bags were distributed containing some MSDN magazines, Visual Studio 2005 Expression Edition, Office 2007 Professional, a T-shirt and a copy of Windows Vista RC1, which made absolutely no sense. Windows Vista is at its RTM stage currently and the least they could do was to provide a copy of RC2, which was available as part of the Customer Preview Program (CPP) for download last month anyway.

Stuff from the bag

The HQ, located on the 21st/22nd floor, was spacious and provided a breath taking view of Marina Bay. Loot was everywhere, especially this refrigerator which was the favorite of many.

View from building

Free loot!

On public display was one of those mini form factor PCs running on Vista, which had a disappointing rating of 2.0, but ran Aero Glass fine anyway. Also on display was a Xbox 360 touting Gears of Wars, which attracted quite a bit of campers.

Xbox 360

Vista on mini-form factor PC

Since it was not possible to attend every single session, unless you’re proficient in time travel, we attended the selected few.

1. Word without Passwords: Is it possible? After Microsoft’s failure to get other service providers to implement Passport authentication, they shifted to a new Identity Metasystem, Windows Cardspace. It was interesting to note that the speaker mentioned such a service should be non-proprietary. Whether that would be the path, one could only speculate at this point.
2. Vista Hits Me… A demo of the various features of Vista, most of which your average geek would already know, as you could find on the web on sites such as www.winsupersite.com.
3. Creating Robotic Applications using Microsoft Robotics Studio. MS Robotics Studio is actually an extension of VS 2005 family which allows a user to write code in .NET intended for robotic devices. Microsoft hopes that this would bring portability to applications written for these devices, so that instead of learning 10 different proprietary languages, you only have to learn one.
4. A Lap Around Windows Mobile 5.0 boasted how easy it was to create an application for WM5.0 using the Visual C# and the .NET Framework. Multiple contrast were made to Java in an attempt to prove its superiority. Coding on the .NET Framework is certainly easier than on J2ME, since you only need to call specific APIs for most functions. However, any remotely decent phone nowadays would come with the Java VM, and most phones still contain some form of manufacturer specific proprietary OS. But according to Microsoft, this is all going to change, soon…
5. XNA: The better way to develop games. If only this was as interesting as the title sounded. I still don’t have a clear idea on what XNA is fully capable of, other than drawing a few sprites here and there. It was a huge bore.

Some GUI apparantly

Lots of arrays

Among other things, it is interesting to note that “I’m feeling lucky” for entering the keyword “search” on Google leads you to Microsoft’s Live search. Also, as MS kindly pointed out, .NET 3.0 is more of a marketing word than anything else, and its actually .NET 2.0 with a few small pluses.

During the lucky draw, statistical probability favored this bunch of about 5 or so TP students, who manage to win a series of prizes consecutively.