PDC 2009: Pre-Conference

November 17th, 2009

There’s PDC again in LACC this year. Thanks to incurable traffic of Los Angeles, I was stuck and will be stuck in the traffic for almost a whole week. The pre-conference this year has a free workshop, Windows 7 Boot Camp, hosted by Mark Russinovich. Yeah, he’s the host and he only talked about less than half an hour 🙁

In the morning they talked about Windows 7 core kernel changes and memory manager enhancements, both were quite informational and interesting. I’m wondering if these two guys will be co-authoring Windows Internals 6th ed. In short (well, really short, the enhancement of Windows 7 is mostly reducing lock contention. Before they actually implemented Windows 7, they measured and identified that many performance bottlenecks were caused by lock contentions. Therefore, Microsoft engineers replaced many coarse-grained lock with fine-grained lock hierarchy so that lock contentions could be reduced. The outcome are very obvious: higher benchmarking for high-end systems, and more snappy response for client machines.

The contents in the afternoon were quite a melange (and honestly, not a tasteful one IMO). They talked about the new features of Windows 7 shell, location and sensor framework, and DirectX. Well, the only new thing IMO is you can use .Net to do those now. Thank you, I’ve already learned these features in PDC 08 with my faithful C++ and I don’t think P/Invoke is that big a deal. At least, the pricing is fair. It’s free since you could find most of the contents last year.

PS. It is not free if you did not get to LACC via public transit. Parking fee is USD$12.

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