Time to get up for Day 5 (Tuesday), the second day on the Microsoft Campus with deep technical sessions.


Looking at Mt. Helen from the bridge between Seattle and Redmond.


And finally getting over to the same buildings as yesterday after arriving at the Microsoft Convention Center. I will also come back here later this day for some extra sessions.


Back at the XNA Building I decided to take a look at some cool DirectX 11 sessions after the first XNA session, which was all about XNA Community games, which is still not available in Germany. So this talk not too exiciting for me yet, but stay tuned, hopefully later this year XNA Community Games will be introduced to Germany as well.


Since all the talks (especially everything about DirectX 11) was heavily under NDA, I can't talk about any of it, neither could I take any pictures. All I can say DirectX 11 is pretty amazing and I will definately check it out once hardware and Windows 7 is available (hopefully also later this year). So to keep the pictures going I took some boring photos like this from the ceiling of the XNA/DirectX sessions building.


Later a couple of guys helped out Kathleen getting some beers up to the last session and Q&A, which was a nice oppertunity to see under a Microsoft building. Might not be terribly exciting, but at least something to remember this day by.


After the last XNA session and some beer, some guys headed over to the company store. The only thing I wanted to buy here in the US is the Intel X25-M SATA SSD hard drive, which I could not found anywhere. Buying it online is also impossible since noone is willing to ship it to europe. So I have to buy it in Germany at 135% of the price here.
At around 5 pm we went back to the Convention Center and most guys went back to their hotels, but I stayed to check out a Paralell Programming session, which was quite interesting at first. The presenter was not very excited. But it was nice to see some cool tools of Visual Studio 2010, especially for debugging multithreaded applications. The stuff he was talking about involved a raytracing application with some spheres, which took even multithreaded 9 seconds for a 200x200 pixel image, so not very convincing to me (this kind of problems are easy to split up into multiple threads) and the other topics he scratched on did not sound very exciting either and since I hoped to see more VS2010 tomorrow at the keynote, I also headed back to the hotel at around 6 pm.


It was raining quite a lot and the EMP party (here are some videos from last year) has already started, but I headed out to finally buy some new batteries for my camera.


Since it was not allowed to take photos of the Science Museum at the EMP and I just wanted to drink and talk I did not take the newly operational camera with me. Instead you can see a boring picture of my hotel room until more pictures will be done tomorrow.