web dev summit summary

well, i'm a little late to the game on the summaries -- drewby and hollywood were blogging fiends this time around...

you can read the summary from their sides here (drew) and here (dave).

a few of the attendees were blogging it as well:

• John C. Bland II: start here and work your way current -- some good note taking/insight.  John also quite possibly got the "youtube" moment of the 3 days and actually did capture it on camera.  apparently the event bus got in a bit of a fender-bender (and that being a ratio of a charter bus fender to that of an import sedan fender)...and got video of the offender (no pun intended) yelling at the bus driver...classic.
• Keith Elder
• Jason Gillmore
• Andrew Stopford
• Paul Reinheimer - who was installing Vista RC1 on his macbook during one session
• and others...

the first day, the softies decided to hang in the lunch room because the other split of the room was a bit crowded and we didn't want to add to that -- so we could only hear what was going on unless we went next door.  it was a bit of a shame because we couldn't hear the questions/comments being discussed, only the presenter.  i initially thought that the session given by anders was not received well, but a straw poll that evening showed that one hitting high marks...guess being in the room mattered :-).

the second day was great, IMO.  wayne smith of the expression team talked/demo'd expression web and showed off some of the standards-based development features.  i think it was received well and there was some pretty good interaction and suggestions.  i particularly liked wayne's comment about getting lorum ipsum into the spell checker dictionaries so it doesn't always show the autocorrect lines ;-).

don box came in and spent the first few moments gathering feedback.  perhaps the highlight of the sessions was when one attendee (mike ho of qcodo) said windows should be free (in jest of course, but maybe not really) and don responded...er...um...eloquently.  it was all fun, and everyone laughed...it is what makes don don.  he was there with steve maine and richard turner and talked about messaging (windows communication foundation) and identity (cardspaces).  both showed some great information and demos.  they took a moment to get feedback on the next version and asked "how do we get an 'A' from you guys for the next version?"  some ideas were json as a wire format, rss/atom as a data format; http-centric programming model, deep integration with atlas.

jim hugunin came in to talk about the ironpython project.  i think this was received well -- there were a lot of questions...not necessarily about python, etc., but the ability to run dynamic languages (and run them well as jim pointed out) and other languages on .NET.  one thing that was very interesting was that the audience (primarily php gurus/authors/speakers/etc.) indicated that the phalanger guys may not be going about it in a way the general php community would like.  they wished they'd show themselves on broader php mailing lists and get more collaboration.  jim indicated he'd try to help with that and definitely agreed that the wrong implementation on .net is not the way to go -- it sounded like news to him, but admittedly he said he wasn't a php guy, and was depending on the phalanger team's expertise and direction.  i personally hope this collaboration gets resolved so that phalanger can be another great example of .net.  josh knowles kept pounding questions about other dynamic language support (ahem, ruby) and was met with long, dramatic pauses.  he kept pressing and said that is microsoft helped support a community like they did with phalanger/ironpython that it might go over well.  jim took some great feedback from the group.

i had to leave when dave massey of the IE team started and also missed any wrap-up discussions, which was a shame, but had to get back for a family emergency earlier than planned.

some other highlights were the discussions around codeplex and some realization that codeplex *isn't* trying to be better than sourceforge (i'll argue 'yet'), but that it's a great place for people to start and leverages some of our platform technologies on the backend (team system).

it was a great couple of days and i hope there is some open communication with the group.