The “real” PDC only starts tomorrow, but today was the pre-conference, meaning it deals with current issues and technologies, as opposed to the PDC itself, which mainly deals with future technologies.
Every attendee that signed up for the pre-conference day (an extra $400) had to choose a specific track, although technically you could switch tracks midway and no one would be the wiser.
Personally, I enrolled in the “Advanced Windows Debugging” track; although I know this stuff pretty well, there are always new things to learn, especially from experienced others. The presenters have written a book with the same name, from which I’ve read some. I was hoping the book will be used as a starting point and (at least the basic stuff) will not be repeated.
I was quite disappointed. The first session dealt with Debugging tools for Windows basics, like downloading, installing and later configuring symbols and a symbol server. Although important stuff, this can be done fairly easily by reading the presenters’ book or looking at the docs.
In the next session, the presenters showed how to look for resource leaks, specifically handles by using WinDbg and other supporting tools from the “Debugging tools for Windows” package. They showed very simple scenarios (with code samples from their book) that allowed them to demonstrate various commands (mostly !htrace)
The next session was about heap corruptions and was more interesting, with details on how the heap manager manages allocations and some ways of debugging them.
The next session was about Windows Error Reporting, which I personally found quite boring, although I can see the usefulness of this feature to organizations.
The last session was about managed code. Daniel did a simple demo of some SOS commands – pretty basic stuff. I think they were surprised (I was not) that many people were interested in managed debugging more than native debugging.
All in all, this day was somewhat disappointing – at least this track. Hopefully other tracks were better. More hopefully – the actual conference will be better!
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s report, here, live, from Los Angeles, CA.