WinHEC Day 0

[Published on my MSN space on April 26, 2005]

I planned on giving a blow-by-blow of WinHEC, but I've had trouble logging into my space and never configured it for email posting. I was finally able to get in from the Internet Cafe here are WinHEC.

Day 0 (Sunday) is typically a non-event. Travel, find the hotel, check-in at the conference, sort through the swag bag, etc.

Travel was particularly painful (still better than traveling through the So. Cal fires for PDC 03) since I was in Ft. Worth on Sunday morning and flew out of Houston Sunday afternoon. After four hours in the car, I sat in the airport for a couple hours then spent four more hours in the plane.

Checking in at the conference was pretty smooth; better than in the past. MS mailed out badges prior to the conference so the only thing I really had to do was grab by bag and go.

The swag bag is back to a traditional laptop case (one-arm bandit) rather than the backpacks that have been handed out at the last few WinHECs. I actually prefer it that way. The software includes some x64 stuff, driver development and test goodies (DDK and WDF) and new Longhorn bits. MS also included a hard copy of their PC design guides. I haven't seen one of these since WinME came out.

I tried to install Longhorn in VirtualPC to no avail. First off, it looks like Longhorn setup cannot create partitions on a VPC Virtual Hard Disk. I was able to use an existing Virtual Hard Disk with an NTFS partition, but setup simple runs for ever. I let it run overnight and finally I had enough and canceled out of it. I'll try to install it on actual hardware when I get back to Houston.

The remainder of the day was spent getting settled into the hotel, so there's not much to tell. Here are some pics at the Hotel.



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