Thursday, November 16, 2006

ADN Dev Days are coming...

For those of you in the Autodesk software development world, the season of joy (and occasional pain) is coming.

ADN Developer Days (and of course the larger, Autodesk University conference) provides a sweeping look at everything new that is coming in the world of Autodesk this year.

I say "joy", because Autodesk is typically demo-ing new products and new features - hopefully both the things that we've always wanted, and the things we never knew we wanted. I say "pain" because inevitably there will be features that STILL after begging, pleading, business cases and everything else - still didn't make the cut.

I'll be blogging from the show more actively this year, but most of the ADN content still happens on just Tuesday.

The other challenge will be figuring out what I'm aloud to say... The ADN conference is all technically under non-disclosure... So while I'll be learning all about new things - I'm probably restricted from blogging about them. So we'll have to see how we walk that tightrope. I believe that things covered in the AU general session (which usually has it's share of sizzle) will be fair game for blogging.

Case in point - I think that Shaan Hurley made the first public announcement that AutoCAD 2008 will have a 64-bit version. Now that's out of the bag - and although I've "sort of" known that it's been coming for 6 months, I'm still grappling with what it will mean for us... How quickly will our customers move? How are all of my developers going to build and test 64-bit versions?

Finally, we're entering the season where I'll have lots to talk about - new releases of all of the Autodesk 2008 product line, and their corresponding APIs... But that's still a ways off yet.

In any case, it's an exciting time of year.