PDC05: Day Four (Ask the Experts more)

After I listening to as much of the keynote as I can tolerate, I went back to the Tools & Languages area of The Big Room. I started by talking to Jim Hogg about how to begin to integrate managed objects into our "framework." The big risk is migrating too much code, since moving code from unmanaged to managed has a performance penalty of around 10-15%. For interface code, this kind of penalty is minor compared to the benefit of easy development. For engine code, on the other hand, the code penalty can be quite severe. They will continue to make gains in optimization, but it will never be as fast as unmanaged code. He had some suggestions once we start using managed code, like using ngen to get a better optimized assembly. I asked some specific COM/Win32 to managed code interop questions and he refered me to either Anson Tsao or Jeff Peil.

Robert and I chatted briefly with the folks at ESRI. I had met their company president, Jack Dangermond, at GITA last March. I have a photo of Adrian and I standing with him and each of us has signed t-shirts. It was nice to talk to them, but strange to see them in such a small booth. ESRI is to GITA as Intel is to the PDC.

I then went to talk to Brandon Bray about how to load managed objects into our "framework," since I could not find Jeff Peil yet. He indicated that we might do it by storing a list of assembly names (strong name) then load those assembly and ask for all of the objects which implement interface "IDeLorme_Foo." You can obtain IUnknown interfaces from them and then give them IUnknown interfaces to work with. This is all good news. I asked more detailed question about that exchange process and he too pointed to Jeff Peil.