I just came back from the MSDN Roadshow in London. We had some great sessions for .NET developers delivered by the UK MSDN team (upcoming sessions in Manchester, Glasgow and Newcastle):
I was actually busy manning the Gaming stand alongside Paul Foster who was showing some of his wizardry on robotics and especially his 1 day old LIBBY a 6 legged robot (Libby hasn’t quite learned to walk yet so she was standing on a tripod but… is amazing and I hope I will see her going around the next time).
Paul is a really amazing guy and I would definitely recommend anyone to follow his blog.
Today I learned from him that:
One may think that this is just stuff for geeks who want to have some fun playing around with cool toys but actually (as Mary Jo Foley posted on her blog an article explaining “Why business users should grab a copy of Microsoft’s new robotics toolkit”) it has a big relevance in a number of different sectors since it includes technologies that are used to maximise the utilisation of multicore and distributed computing systems.
I also met a couple of guys from the Vista Squad user group (check out the bitesize interview they took from me… I’ll post the link once it’s live… scary). We had very interesting conversations on Test Driven Development, Scrum and Agile and had some fun playing some cool XNA games on the Xbox 360 (I will be at their next meet up on May 27th in the Microsoft Offices in London Victoria… if you live around and have some spare time join us for some evening fun, geeky talk and an opportunity to visit an amazing facility).
One think I noticed speaking with people is that there is a relevant portion of developers still transitioning from Visual Basic 6 who are learning the advantages of using .NET in their job. The other thing that stroke me (and keeps striking me as I meet more and more people both in Academia and other environments) is that many people simply don’t know many of the things that we do.
As a company we are very good at making information available internally and for this reason at times we tend to assume that everybody else knows about what we are doing and this is simply not the case. People have their daily jobs, their University studies, their families and their free time and cannot necessarily pay attention to all the announcements of new technologies being released by us and all the other players in the industry.
In his just published Services Strategy Update, Ray Ozzie says: "I hope you'll share my excitement and optimism as you experience how we're bringing together the power of the Internet, with the magic of software, across a world of devices".
Being part of events like this one, like the Vista Squad meeting, like the Inspiration Tour makes me feel I am contributing to the effort of increasing the level of knowledge and awareness that people have about technology, software and how these can make their life better, easier, more fun.
And this is a great feeling.