My flight got in pretty late last night and after fixing a shampoo leak I went down for a few drinks with the Vanderboom.  Despite going to bed at 1:30am and getting up at 6am, I woke up more rested than the average night of Ethan waking up constantly.

The first item of business this morning was the Keynote with Bill Gates, in his last public speaking appearance as a full-time Microsoft employee.  The Keynote was an extended version of the “Bill’s last day” video with several high level presentations by other MSFT folks and a Q&A with Bill at the end.  The highlight of the show was the “Ballmer Bot”, a robot that rolled out onto stage screaming “Developers, developers, developers…”

My first session this morning was Steve Teixeira on the Parallel Computing platform.  He showed several brief PFX demonstrations on Stephen Toub’s Quad-core laptop.  Stephen was present in the audience.    I hung around for quite a long time after this session was over talking to Stephen.  I asked if anyone at Microsoft was thinking about tipping over the sacred cow of thread affinity, specifically as it relates to the Holy Gui Thread.  You know, all those WinForms and WPF objects that you cannot touch from any other thread.  This seems like a serious bottleneck in the age of Many-Core computing.  The example I gave was potentially performing the calculations for animations on other threads.  Apparently, WPF almost did not go the static-apartment route, but there were a laundry list of issues with the OS/Shell having some baggage that ultimately drove that team back to the old ways.  A lot of people at Microsoft are thinking about this though, so that’s a good thing.  We also talked briefly about managing dependencies between parallel tasks, the PFX team definitely intends for us to make our units of work inherit from Task.  Stephen thinks we should be able to use the new “ContinueWith” semantics in the June CTP to handle executing a task-tree. (http://www.damonpayne.com/2008/04/03/ManagingConcurrencyWithTrees0.aspx )  I will investigate this, though perhaps not until the plane ride home. 

My next Silverlight session was full, so I’m going to look for another session to round out the day.  The Vanderboom and I are having dinner with MSFT Central Region folks at a nice steak house later.  You’ve gotta love these events.