I'm partway through spending a week at Microsoft for two conferences, "Academic Days on Trustworthy Computing" (ADTC) and the "Microsoft Technology Summit" (MTS)…
ADTC (now concluded) was a sort of security conference—all of the speakers save one were Microsoft folks, and almost all the attendees were academics. There was a lot of really interesting policy and requirements stuff, but less interesting technical content.
I'm now starting in on the Microsoft Technology Summit (MST), which is quite a different beast. The attendees here are essentially all Microsoft "outsiders"—about equally split between open source luminaries (and some of them really luminary) and Java luminaries (whose luminosity I am not qualified to evaluate). The purpose is for Microsoft to open a dialog with this wider world; an admirable purpose indeed IMHO.
The contrast between the participants at MTS and at ADTC is quite noticeable. This bunch is about 15 years younger, much more development-oriented, and much more interested in the tech. I had big fun with the last group, and it looks like I'll have big fun with this one, but I'm definitely shifting gears / switching hats for MTS.
Tuesday 11 April, 10:16 AM: I am sitting in our first talk session, which is IronPython creator Jim Hugenin talking about Python on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR). It's a really interesting, informative, demo-oriented talk, and IronPython looks like a really nice Python embedding. Hugenin is telling a lot of really interesting stories about how it was all done and how it all works; he came from and has (mostly) continued to work closely with the Python open source community, so a lot of things were done right.
I wonder if it's in any way pointful if you're not in Windows, though? There was just a really ambiguous hint of a possibility that this stuff will run on some Microsoft tech rather than Mono on Mac and Linux in the future; maybe Microsoft will finally open source their Rotor CLR implementation (currently "Shared Source") and bring it up to date? That would be cool.
11:24 AM: After asking some pointed questions, my intuition is that what's actually going to happen is a MS effort to get CLR working and integrated on the Mac. (Note that I have heard no official or unofficial statement to this effect; it's just my guess.) This makes some kind of short-term business sense for MS, especially since they own a decent share of Apple. But it looks like Mono is going to be the name of the CLR game in the Linux world for the near future.