It was, of course, fun to watch Bill Gates give his keynote on Day One. The video segment was entertaining, though a bit lost on me – it was a spoof on Napoleon Dynamite, which I have not seen. Jim Allchin’s keynote was also good; it was fun to see Windows 1.0 running on an old IBM XT. He claimed that 475 million new PCs will ship in the two years after Windows Vista is released; I reckon I’ll be one of the buyers. The best part of the keynotes on Day One was the demos. We saw Windows Vista and Office “12” and Superfetch and “Atlas” and WPF and WCF and LINQ, etc. Great stuff.

The keynotes on Day Two were a bit less interesting. The first half wasn’t too bad; we saw demos of Windows Workflow Foundation and the new Expression products for designing the next generation of cool user interface. The second half was, unfortunately, one of the most boring demos I’ve ever sat through, being about two technologies I (still) know nothing about, InfoPath and SharePoint.

I had low expectations for the keynote on Day Three, but it turned out fine. It was all about the new features coming for Windows Server, including better debugging of Web applications, remote computing, the new console, and IIS improvements, particularly for ASP.NET applications.

The “trouble” with the PDC is that it’s about products that won’t ship for a year or two; I’m ready now!