I had a great meeting Friday afternoon here in Barcelona with several great developers working hard on interoperability in their respective areas of technology including VC++, C#, Visual Studio Team System, and Open XML.  These folks are excited about participation in the Interoperability community by blogging, participating in events/webcasts, and by providing regular feedback on Microsoft interoperability efforts.  The community is starting to reach critical mass, and I am currently shooting for an early December launch of the blog aggregator on microsoft.com/interop.

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The expo floor was surprisingly busy for the last day of the conference (and a Friday).

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I had a great chat with Doug Mahugh (seen here explaining the benefits of open document formats) who mentioned that there is really a lot of great work going on in the developer community around Open XML – even beyond the great work that is happening on the OpenXMLDeveloper.org site.  In fact, he put me in touch with a couple of the developers from France with whom he spoke who have participated in building some of the great solutions on the MSDN France website.  One of the fellows I met was Julien Chable, who has a great Java Open XML sample demonstrating cross-platform interoperability.

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Bob and Ajay had some great conversations at the Protocol Licensing booth over the week as ISVs continue to recognize Access to Microsoft IP as one of the many ways to achieve seamless interoperability with their solutions.

I am sticking around for IT Forum this week as well, and will be blogging sporadically.  Stay tuned for comments on feedback received from IT Pros on my Open XML Interoperability chalk & talk, as well as some other interoperability news…