Back from Switzerland

Well, we made it back from Switzerland. West is the easy direction in terms of jet
lag, but I’m starting to droop pretty badly at the moment. Hopefully that means
I’ll get a solid night’s sleep tonight – I woke up at midnight Zurich-local
time last night, and couldn’t get back to sleep before the alarm went off at
3:15AM so we could catch our flight.

At any rate, the conference was great. Most of the sessions were in German, but there
were a few in English. Based on the ones I did catch, I think the attendees got a
really great deal. And I had a great time delivering my talks on threading and on
Managed DirectX. The Managed DirectX one in particular went quite well – I managed
to cover the absolute basics of Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectInput, and DirectPlay
(including nine demos that all worked!) in 80 minutes. The slides and demos should
be up on the conference website either now or in the near future, but since I can’t
read German, it’s pretty hard for me to figure out which link it is, so I’ll
be posting the content here as well. Just give me a few days to dig through my email
and recover mentally.

The conference was also enjoyable in that I got to see some old friends as well as
make some new ones. I’ll refrain from doing the Great Blog Name Drop and listing
them, but I have to thank Sascha Corti in
particular for acting the perfect host. My wife and I both felt extremely welcome
and well taken care of.

Now that I’m back and no longer have conference talk prep work to do, I can
devote some time to a few projects that I’ve had on hold. In particular, I want
to get my blog ported to dasBlog 1.5 (just
released), to write the next article or articles in my Direct3D series (I’ve
done a bunch of reading and understand some things better now) and to finally get
a start on one or two games that I’ve been wanting to write. We’ll see
how it all goes what with the holidays and all the other, normal things that need
doing.