On Monday, I primarily talked to customers and partners. Yesterday, I spent most of my time talking to other Microsofties that I hadn’t seen or spoken to in a while. For example, Tim Mallalieu was there talking about the Entity Data Model. I worked with Tim a few years back – I did his first interview when he came to Microsoft. We didn’t talk much EDM, but it sure was good to see him.
I finally met Gareth Jones in person. Gareth – along with Steve, Stuart and Alan – have a new book out on the DSL toolkit. Neither stealing nor cajoling worked, I’ll have to go get my own copy or read it on Safari. Gareth and I talked a while about language evolution – how DSLs come to be. One of the subjects we talked about was internal DSLs - I’ll be interested in Gareth’s non-immediate reaction. Gareth also blogged yesterday about a TechEd announcement that I had missed: VS 2008 Shell.
I also spent a long time talking to various members of the DLR team. There seems to be quite a stir brewing about how the Ruby and Microsoft community can / will come together. I will wisely keep my opinions to myself – I’m already in the REST/SOAP fray, no need to join another – though I will say that it’s encouraging to hear the call for “a good, complete [Ruby language] specification” in order to support multiple implementations.