Sorry for the lack of posts of late. Life and too much travel are getting in the way.

Last week, Microsoft flew me out to Seattle for their Microsoft Technology Summit(MTS). The MTS is an event where 50 people who range from tolerating to pure distain for Microsoft come and hear what Microsoft is up to and tell Microsoft where they suck. This is a second annual event for Microsoft and this year they made it more international with people from Japan India, Russia and even Canada. Approximately 1/2 in the room were Java oriented and a sprinkling of an array of other open source development environments. I’m certain there were more laptops in the room from Apple than any other brand.

Microsoft brought in a varied array of speakers and tried to avoid PPT’s as much as possible and get right into demos and conversations. Rick Rashid from Microsoft Research spoke about about all the research stuff coming out of Microsoft. He spoke of the “Minority Report” mapping app and the video was cool. Cooler yet was our visit to the Microsoft Museum and getting to actually PLAY with it. Basically take a mapping application and use your hands to navigate and zoom in/out on the map. It was a fun experience and felt really natural. It uses three cameras behind the screen and worked incredibly well. We all zoomed into our houses. Cool!

Don Box was energetic and passionate about everything Microsoft. He made had us help him make a laundry list of questions about what Microsoft was doing wrong. He was very entertaining. Scott Guthrie gave a great session on ASP.NET & Atlas which I’ll detail a bit more in an upcoming post. Sanjay Parthasarathy was good and the Info Card stuff was interesting. Jim Gray from Microsoft Research talked a lot about Terra Server and Microsoft’s desire to solve big problems. It was great of Jim to stick around for lunch and chatted with us on an array of topics. Microsoft even threw in a bonus session based on our feedback discussing the Microsoft Office XML format which is intended to open up the Office format.

I wasn’t the only one in the room pressing Chris Wilson of the IE7 team to adopt Firefox’s XPI as the standard for extending IE7 or IE8. I was going to bring up the discussion and someone else beat me to it.

The event was well organized and it was an honor to be among the many attendees. Microsoft brought out some great people to present and interact with. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with our feedback.

I have more insights from the event coming in a post that I’m still working on… coming soon.

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