Within Windows

Friday, woooo! Our first round-table went well; we were briefed on CoApp and had some preliminary discussions… but today we promised to be more productive. We all met in the lobby, as ordered, and walked again over to Bravern II… but there was a change in plans. We took a different set of elevators. We were whisked up the Bravern II tower to floor 23 (or so) and placed into a larger meeting room. Nice view from up here! This meeting room was double the size of the original, with a different table configuration. Rather than one solid piece, the table was broken up into modules that connected around the entire room, with the middle empty; a space reserved for the exotic dancers, I’m sure. One downside to this configuration was the lack of the Polycom CX5000 panoramic gizmo. We made do with Garrett’s travel webcam, though.

I visited the kitchen for breakfast then returned shortly after. Thirty minutes later… nothing happened. Where the heck is everyone, I thought. Time was flying by and we haven’t even started; Garrett was pacing back and forth, foaming at the mouth when… a group of people walked in, relieved someone had found them. It turns out, they were locked away in some corner of the building (due to keycard restrictions throughout). Whoops.

Settled in, we started discussing the finer points of CoApp packaging, like the metadata to be made available on every single package. Attributes name, description and author were straight-forward but other attributes like version number and type drew immense fire (and blood).

After hours of discussion, we tabled the discussion and jumped into Connect shuttles to raid the Microsoft Store of its loot. Despite having gone earlier in the week, I picked up a few items I missed, such as Microsoft Streets and Trips – admittedly for the bundled GPS device only – and some Xbox 360 ‘ware. (Retail pricing for Xbox hardware is crazy.)

For lunch, we walked over to The Mixer again. In line at a Mexican eatery, participant Nasser Dassi called me over, excited – he had located the Mexican Jarritos soda, made with real cane sugar. I immediately grabbed one. I also grabbed a rare slice of Tres Leches (three milks) cake on display. The cake, traditionally made with condensed milk, evaporated milk, and heavy cream, was absolutely kick ass.

We returned to the Bravern II building, full from both eating and shopping. Leaving the metadata discussion alone, we moved onto task delegation – basically, who will own/work on what piece of CoApp. For example, I’m responsible for the Microsoft Detours-powered tracing tool that will monitor an existing build process and spit out metadata, ultimately to be used in Microsoft Visual Studio project file creation. Sweet! (A list of all delegated tasks can be found on the wiki.)

Wrapping up work, we returned to the hotel and walked over to The Parlour Billards and Spirits for fun, where we had an entire private room to ourselves housing three billiard tables, a television lounge area and food all around. Trent Nelson and I, having a bit of fun, decided to peek into a room through what looked like an EXIT door… We discovered there was a comedy club next door and Jackass’ “Wee-Man” Jason Acuña was on stage! Sadly, a bouncer quickly discovered us and shut the door. Ass.

Closing the billiard shop, a few of us took the escalator down to Lucky Strike and finished the night. We all did poorly, but somehow I managed to come in first with a sub-par 105. Yikes. Perl guru Adam Baxter, however, scored the #1 position in throwing speed, a game only geeks like us would invent to exploit the lane’s measurement sensors.

It was a fun night. No, scratch that. A fun week. But all the fun had to come to an end at some point. A very special thanks to Microsoft, Tanya Young and Garrett Serack specifically, for everything. (Garrett: “That’s what she said.")

Update: Tom identified the USB doo-dad, thanks!

Well, starting the series with a negative number didn’t work out as planned. I had to jump from Day –1 to Day 1 which doesn’t exactly make sense. Technically, this is Day 0. Let’s just pretend we have an off-by-one error and move on.

Dragging myself out of bed, I managed to make it to the lobby by the required 0730. I met a host of people alien to me, with an assorted range of accents ranging from Australian to Dutch. Everyone still a bit shy, we walked next door to Bravern II and met with Tanya, our event planner/logistical superstar. She handed us some stickers, one with our name to apply to our shirts, and another with our wireless access details. Ending our trek, we arrived at the meeting room; the room was standard issue, a large round table with convenient power and wiring access. At the middle of the table was a Microsoft Roundtable/Polycom CX5000 device neat USB doo-dad that provided a panoramic view of all meeting participants. In addition to providing a great view of the room, it had a secondary video stream that would always show the current speaker, using some sort of directional acoustics black magic. I want one.

To kick off the meeting, Garrett gave an awesome presentation that defined CoApp and stated its goals. The presentation, unlike all the diction circling around the wiki, was given in a plain manner that even I understood. So what is CoApp, you ask? Errrr, hold off for the presentation video. (I’ll keep poking Garrett to get me a copy for post.) Looking around the room, it was evident that everyone knew CoApp wasn’t going to be easy. We’re changing how applications are compiled, developed, and installed on Windows – something that hasn’t changed in decades. This is ground zero. This is big.

Afterwards, we started The Discussions. (This part of the summit was my favorite.) We would introduce a topic, talk about Garrett’s initial implementation of said topic, then go ape shit about its flaws, change some details, and repeat … until it became “good enough”.

We had people taking notes via Google Docs, of which would then be formatted and placed into the CoApp wiki. Things were a cluster… – and being geeks, we all loved it.

Rather than describe in great detail what we talked about, I suggest you visit the CoApp wiki. If you have any questions regarding why something was spec’ed the way it is, feel free to let us know via the mailing list, IRC, or hell tweet Garrett directly. Feedback is critical at this point in development.

After we hit 6pm, we called it quits and went back to the hotel. Freshened up, we all met in the lobby again and walked over to Canadian restaurant Earls. Inside was your typical restaurant configuration and dark decor but we were taken through a hallway into a private room with a sliding door and huge table in the center. The track lighting prevented us from bumping into each other. The food was geared towards steak house offerings, and having had dinner with Jared, I wasn’t in the mood for steak. I did, however, spot (and order) a rack of ribs that was smothered in a delicious sauce, with some Vodka/Redbull grog. Near the conclusion of our dinner, the restaurant lighting dimmed to the point where we all had a hard time seeing. For indoor hermits to complain about lighting… yikes. Worse, if you found the bathroom, inside you couldn’t even see the toilet. That’s just stupid, if you ask me.

Filled with food and drink, we returned to the hotel and parted ways. ‘twas a long day…

Hump day. Again, the morning was saturated with importing photos, fixing a few up, and typing something up. I was running a little behind, due to the awkward schedule of the Connect shuttles, but no biggie. I met up with Wendy at Building 88 and tagging along with Paul Donnelly, we headed out to grab some mystery burgers. We pulled into a full parking lot and walked over to a little hole-in-the-wall eatery entitled I ♥ Burger and Sub [sic]. Clearly they only sell one burger and one sub here. This grammatical failure of immeasurable magnitude, Paul alluded to, must be a result of a multi-foreign-hand operation in all points of the sign’s life – ranging from initial request to creation and installation. Grammar aside, the burgers were unusually delicious. Paul, Wendy, and I could not identify what makes the burgers so delicious though, which makes your mind wander and wonder… Perhaps they sneak some sugar into their meat, a similar tactic used by Papa Johns pizza?

Back at the office, Wendy and I pushed Paul back into his cage and went to explore the infamous swag closet. Not an actual closet, but rather an empty full office, it contained a collection of marketing materials spanning from years ago – think Windows Millennium – to current day. I can’t go into detail as to what was in there, but lets say … cases of Corona? Loaded up with trinkets, I returned to the offices, said my goodbyes, tears streaming, and left Building 88. Paul and Wendy are good people.

Walking out the door, my phone buzzed. Cullen Dudas was on the other end, reminding me (thankfully) of our meet up at Commons. We met, shook hands, and I left. I kid. We walked over to Studio A, a predominately (if not completely) Xbox-owned building. Sadly, I didn’t get past the welcome area, but it was nice to sit down and talk nerd.

Unlike the previous two days, I didn’t spend a lot of time on campus. I returned to the hotel and briefly met up with the CoApp guys in the lobby. Ex-IT ‘softie Jared Shockley showed up and we departed to The Keg, your usual awesome steak house. (On the way, we hilariously passed a Google building.) Jared had a piece of meat with some of contraption involving twizzly frizzy onion straws (or whatever the hell) and other assorted funniness. I had a New York strip with a mushroom-based sauce cooked to medium with a baked potato side, smothered with a three-cheese butter with a glass of Guinness. We chatted about all his horror stories from working at Microsoft, which were more hilarious than scary, then fairly contrasted with some warm, fuzzy stories.

I’ve had this draft in my Windows Live Writer queue all day, adding bits at a time due to amount of work going on today… so I’m going to end this abruptly — I went to bed at the end. (Next update, covering Thursday, will be about our crazy meeting).