I present at second day of PDC 2005

Waking up early, I pressed my PDC 2005 T-shirt, took a shower, had very light breakfast, and sped off to the venue, as I was speaking during the first session at the conference. I had my WiFi adapter with me because I had spotted a WiFi access point at Grapevine. I started and finsihed my presentation using some online resources. My camcorder had the wrong cassette in it, and instead of a researcher at Microsoft talking about WSE, I found on the screen, my nephew in diapers crawling
and playing. Shoots! Anyway, I remembered how the webcast had been structured, so I prepared my presentation until Adnan and Hammad arrived. I studied a little bit for the presentation and then
the volunteer arrived to take me to the hall. I talked about Web Services Security using WSE 2.0, showed the demo and then had some questions and answers.
There was trouble with the projectors and the laptop wasnt running on AC power even though it was plugged in. I guess the plug had not made contact with the power outlet. I kept my cool and while the tech staff worked on the projectors, I kept joking with the audience, and kept going describing what WSE 2.0 was etc. I guess anyone with less public experience would've been toast. He/she would've whinned about the arrangements and shut up while they worked, which would've been the
worst mistake you could make. Just a tip. I'm sure my rating would've suffered due to the projectors, but if I had made that mistake, it would've been worse.
When I returned to Emerald, wanting to ask Clemens about Indigo and the fact that I was having trouble setting up a demo on it for the next day's presentation, I found that he was having trouble because his demos which were built for Indigo March 2005 CTP were not working on Indigo Beta 1 RC.
He said that he was downloading the CTP which was around 350 MB up in his room. I told him that I had it on CD, and he was very happy. The thing about Clemens is that you can not see if he is happy. He always is very straight faced and looks very serious, so he doesnt look very
approachable. I ran to the community lounge, not believing my luck that I was about to actually "help" Clemens, I searched through all my CDs, found the one that had it, ran with it to the Emerald room and gave it to Clemens and then returned to the lounge. Later on, he came to announced to me that there was something wrong with the CD. I told him not to worry as I also had the ISO image on a different CD and that should work. I looked for it, found it and took it to him in Emerald and he gave me a USB hard disk drive and I copied it onto it successfully. While he installed it to his laptop, I went back to the community lounge with great pride that I had managed to do someone of that stature a "favor." At least he would go back with a positive state of mind and just maybe, we would be able to make one-to-one contact over email. Let's see. I'm sure he's a busy man, but I am very excited about the Indigo product group and he works very closely with them,
and he has excellent concepts about service orientation, software architecture, scalability, transactions, in short, distributed and interconnected systems. I asked him about my problem that I was unable to download and install Indigo Beta 1 RC on Windows 2003 Server and he said that Indigo was only installed that way and there is no way to download it completely before installing. The best guess that he could make for me was that I needed to update windows. Now, I have seen him many times, and people ask him questions. Clemens never makes guesses. If he did that for me, I think that was because he felt towards me as more than what he felt towards the audience. I am touched. Thank you Clemens.
A man waiting in the queue in the lobby greeted me, congratulated me and said that he was very proud and happy for me. I was touched and thanked him and said that it was his greatness that he appreciated our efforts. Several other people did the same during the event. I am grateful to Allah for this appreciation.
Me and Hammad went to Saddar on rickshaw since my car wasnt parked at the hotel, but at the conference parking in the DJ Science College groud. We picked up his INETA Pakistan logo shirts from the tailor, had the tailor press the black one. Hammad put it on there. We went to collect the remaining chess boards from Saddar. The engraving was not as good as last time. We paid the balance and went back to the hotel.
I got back to updating Windows. Voila, there is an update for BITS and Windows Installer. I put it to update. All day passes and several restarts later, Windows 2003 Server is downloading the last piece of update which is huge 350 MB SP1, and Indigo Beta 1 RC is now installed. I recalled that I had given my Whidbey Beta 2 DVD to a student of Hammad's this morningm and I need to install Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 on my laptop. Adnan had earlier gone home and stayed home because he was not feeling well. I tried to call Adnan to see if he could bring me one of his Beta 2 DVDs, but he didnt answer. Hammad caught up with his student soon and I had my DVD back. I started the installation process on stage at the question and answer session. Hammad convinced me to shut the lid of the laptop and I put it down under my seat. After the Q&A session, I installed WinFX SDK on my laptop, and re-ran the demos, but I was still having the same problem.
Since my car was parked away from the hotel and the gift wrapping paper was inside it, Hammad suggested we have ourselves ripped off by buying some wrapping paper from the book shop at the hotel. We didnt have change and the shopkeeper wouldnt accept the Rs. 1000 bill. A volunteer was nice enough to lend us the money. You know who you are, and I thank you very much for it. You probably know how I felt this morning when I helped Clemens. That's how the world works. No man is an island. We help each other.
We went to dinner with the other speakers to BarBQ Tonight. The food was pathetic as always. Cold. Me and Hammad continuously worked on our demos and presentations. Everyone teased us to shut the laptops down, but we told them that we had sessions coming up tomorrow morning and we'd be toast if we didnt finish now. Jawwad seemed to look at us with appreciation as he saw us working hard and never tiringly for his event. I had no luck with Indigo. Arvindra suggested to me several times, ask Clemens, he will help you. But I did not dare to go up to him during dinner. He is very business like. I felt sure that he would not answer any technical question over dinner. Arvindra asked me how long I had been working with Indigo. I said, one week. He said, "One week? And you're presenting a session on it? That's brave!" I took that as a compliment, and prayed that it goes well.
The trouble I was having was that when I ran a service, and approached it in a web browser, the WSDL showed up, but when I fired up the svcutil tool to it, it timed out. I gave up when dinner arrived, turned off my laptop and put it under the table, had dinner and hated it. Then we gave gifts to the speakers whom we had not given gifts to last night. We also gave one to Jawwad.
On our way back, I dropped Hammad near Lal Qila as he caught a cab back to his place and I drove like a maniac back to mine. I started Steve Schwartz's MSDN TV show to prepare the first part of my presentation, then Doug Purdy's MSDN TV show to prepare the second part. I then took queue from Doug's demo to prepare my own and finally went to sleep at 2:30 am, once again, setting the alarm to 5 am.