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catching up on the mts experience.  i noticed is blogging pretty real-time as well on the event (from an attendee perspective).

ie7

this morning we started with a session about ie7.  true to the request,  came with 3 slides (one of which was a title slide) and opened up for discussion.  there was some good improvements demonstrated in tabbed browsing, rss integration, streamlined ui (msft’s opinion of course), zooming, scaled printing (yeah! no right cut-offs), etc.

chris also articulated about ie7 security being a big focus — information bar warning of weak settings, phishing filtering, etc. — as well as isolation of execution on some controls

the third tenat has been around standards — ie7 is a HUGE improvement.  there really is nothing to write about here — download it and see the improvements.

next up: luca “mini anders” bolognese

anders hejlsberg was on holiday this week and although it was disappointing to not have him hear, it is understandable that you don’t get the distinguished engineers every time you ask them to be there :-).  luca, however, was great.  he jumped right in to demonstrating linq, dlinq and xlinq — all great stuff and got some interest from the crowd about the execution of various queries using almost a dynamic language look/feel.

more linq info: linq dev center

xbox extensibility

brian keller from the xna team hosted our lunch and talked about the xna development toolkit for gaming.  this isn’t just for xbox/windows, but aids the process in developing games on multi platform areas.  what i learned was the toolkit is very expensive but with that costs, comes a lot of msft love — apparently unparalleled in the gaming industry (read: you gets lots of support — even at the code level).  what i also learned is that joe developer can’t likely get a dev kit — these are going to studios.  the reason for this is due to the gamers demanding more from their consoles/games — and the hobbyist doesn’t necessarily guarantee that same level of quality and game play.  these kits are, however, being seen in academia which may help the proliferation of game developers.

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ai’s started a blog war — tag, you’re it — ha ha — i’m better than you.

and i’ll add some substance…

atlas released the atlas control toolkit today — WITH SOURCE CODE.  what?  microsoft releasing some source code with some binaries…are you kidding me?  are pigs flying?

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anand just reminded me of what we saw last night…check out what he wrote about

ai blog

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conference food breakfasts usually don’t intrigue me.  i’m not even a breakfast person — i hate it (yeah, most important meal of the day, blah, blah — leave me alone — i’m fat and getting fatter, so what.)

but this morning was different…

i sat down and was listening to and others chat about source control and collaboration.  it was very intriguing to hear…some felt that source control isn’t necessary for even smaller samples sets due to the effort to even set it up.

i won’t iterate through the entire conversation, but one comment i felt was interesting was about how poeple (especially the open source community) are less likely to use anything if there isn’t an infrastructure for collaboration and evolation on that “thing” (read: sample, project, snippet, etc.).  i completely agree with this.  and i’ve personally fallen into that as well.  i’ve submitted samples, written code and even promised distribution, but simply haven’t done it with some things like feedreader.  i’m at fault.  this statement made me really realize how much better my code could be if that infrastructure was created around them.

one other comment that was interesting was almost the need to combine wiki-ish activity around this source collaboration…pointing out that checkin/checkout isn’t enough.  brian pointed out that viewvc introduces that functionality for subversion…

hmm…maybe needs to implement better collaboration to be more viral? — think it will happen ;-)?

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the evening event was a trip to the company store (read: buy stuff for cheap) and then an evening at the microsoft visitor center/museum.  almost immediately upon arriving…the fire alarm went off.  imagine about 80 people with handfuls of keyboards, xbox games and perihperals, etc…and then being asked to leave the building — quite a sight.

here’s the scene outside:

fire alarm at the company store

it was quite funny actually — and oddly enough was the caterers for our event that had something smoke-up and caused the alarm to sound.

the museum is a good place to hang out for a while…a little disappointing they took out the media center demos though.  some pics

visitor center party

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