Day 3 means the main conference started and the population of geeks swelled to insane numbers.

The first session I tried to attended was XBox live arcade. Well I should say tried to attend - they were flowing out of the door. However, in a surprising fit of organisation, they picked everyone up and moved them to a bigger room. Looks like there is lots of interest in live arcade. There was no mention of the XNA framework and how (or if) that fits into live arcade.

I spent the rest of the day mainly in the ATI graphics sessions. They showed a demo of a new performance monitoring tool which captures a lot of the same information as PIX but displays it in charts in real-time as the application is running. The afternoon sessions were the ATI demo team talking through several of their latest demos.

After taking it easy in the evening the 1st few nights I wandered the expo hall looking for free beer (not enough), free food (not bad but they needed a map to show you where to find it) and free swag (very, very poor - just 1 t-shirt this year. Thanks Intel!). Then a quick dash back to the hotel to drop stuff off and then I was off to the Casual Games party. Pretty good, especially once I found a guy with drink tickets. Though most folk got one ticket on the way in, it was apparent that others had found a way to get more. I got back at 2am so I am a little woozy today.

In terms of Managed DirectX its slightly better than last year. I have had the usual couple of 'never heard of it' and 'why would I ever want to use that'. But I've also had one guy who knew of The ZBuffer and several other folk who totally see the advantages. I've found a couple of things done with managed code which I need to confirm before I put on the site too. It seems the managed code on the Xbox 360 news really hasn't excited many hardcore game developers, at least not the ones I talked to. In other sad news it looks like Microsoft chose not to run my demo on the booth :-( Well I've not seen it yet anyway.