The past 2 days have been jammed packed with great content on some of our development technologies and our thoughts on future directions. It was great having several high profile PHP influentials join us in the conversation. As a thank you (other than the constant flow of mind-altering cocktails) is a trip to the company store. After our deep technical discussions over the past 2 days, it’ll be interesting to see if everyone goes for the Xbox games or Development tools. We also were able to scrounge up some DVDs for Windows Vista RC1. Several attendees actually installed it while attending the summit, and at least one of thosewas on aMac Book Pro- very cool!

It’s time to head home now and I am *NOT* looking forward to the flight. This is the first time that I can remember where I have to catch a connecting flight back to Chicago. One of the nice things about living in the Windy City is the availability of direct flights to most points on this earth. Not this time. My adventure takes me from Seattle to San Francisco to Chicago. A normal 4 hour flight has suddenly turned into a 6+ hour flight. Ugh! All for the purpose of making it back in time for a golf tournament I’m playing in on Saturday. Get into Chicago at 5AM, tee off at 11AM. Yeah, baby!

In the fashion of JoJo and informing everyone of something that I learned todaywas that theIE team posted an IE7 quick reference sheet up on the IE7 blog. Very handy!

Last night we had a reception at Trader Vics in Bellevue. To say the drinks at Trade Vics are strong, is an understatement. You could strip the paint off a buick with this stuff. If the power went out, all we would’ve had to do is light one of the Mai Tai’s on fire and it would still be burning – an eternal flame to say the least.

While most of us were growingnew chest hair, thanks to the cocktails, there were others having great technical discussions, including Scott Guthrie whipping out his laptop and showing Andy Stopford a thing or two on LINQ and ASP.NET. As a matter of fact, Keith Elder even has some video of the discussion. Geeks and their toys… got to love it!

After last night’s potent cocktail barrage at Trader Vic’s, we were back at this morning for Day 2 of the Microsoft Web Development Summit. Things really heated up when Don Box took the stage and presented the question to the attendees of, “Tells us how Microsoft sucks”. Always a popular question that generates a lot of great feedback which included items such as:

- The Registry

- Get it to run on the Mac or Linux

- Better scripting and less clicking

- Build a better console window

- Need an ssh equivalent to the command line

And so on. This question serves two purposes. One – to gain better feedback on where we can improve. Two – to get a sense of what information that attendees might be missing. Such as the fact that we have a new and improved shell coming out called PowerShell. It’s the first re-write of a shell on the Windows platform since the days of the infamous Command.Com.

I found that some of our attendees are also blogging the event, here are some trackbacks to their thoughts…

Keith Elder

Andy Stopford- yes Andy, Don is crazy, but we still love him

John Bland

I’m in Redmond (WA) for the next couple of days particpating in a unique event on campus – the Web Development Technology Summit. This summit brings together 20 or so (non-Microsoft) web development influentials in for a conversation with Microsoft on our web technology strategy and future directions. People like Ilia Alshanetsky, Sean Coates, Josh Knowles, Reg Cheramy, Andrew Stopford, David Sklar and several others.

On the agenda are talks around ASP.NET, LINQ, Atlas, IIS7, Expression, Windows Communication Foundation, IronPython, and Windows Workflow. A *ton* of great material to cover in 2-days!

This isn’t a ploy by Microsoft to try to brainwash these fine friends of PHP-land but to open up a dialogue; show them some of our tools and technolgies and garner their feedback – good or bad. A chance to learn something from both sides of the fence. I know I plan on tackling Josh Knowles tonight at dinner to talk about Ruby on Rails and how, after seeing ASP.NET, their might be an opportunity to develop a similar philosophy that RoR lives by in .NET.

On the Microsoft front, we’re bringing out our big guns. People like Scott Guthrie, Anders Hejlsberg, Brad Abrams and Don Box.

It’s shaping up to be a great event. I’m really excited to get a chance to discuss the differences/similarities between the two camps. Dinner tonight should be highly entertaining.

As Team System adoptionis taking off, I’m sure many of you have all kinds of fleeting questions that you’d like to ask the product team. Well, you’ll have that very chance on September 6th with the next VSTS Public MSDN Chat session.

Visual Studio Team System Public MSDN Chat

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am – 11:00am Pacific time.

To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.