I really intended to blog the rest of my Microsoft visit. Somehow, though, it didn't get done. The MS folks kept us busy dawn-to-dusk, and any spare time I had was spent getting work done and catching up with things…
I'm pretty excited about where the .NET languages and runtime teams are going—except that the lack of implementations for my platforms will probably continue to keep them irrelevant except as design examples. I'm also interested to see what Windows Vista looks like when it comes out—there were some interesting technology demos.
It looks to me like security is still going to be a problem for Microsoft. They have a lot of different levels, but nothing that looks to do a good job with the fundamental problem: many existing MS 3rd-party apps still run with full privilege and are full of security holes. This is a hard problem for MS to solve, so they apparently have just stayed away from it for the most part. New properly-built managed code apps look like they'll be pretty safe, and MS has spent a lot of effort trying to clean up its internal codebase. Until they attack the core problem, though, I think things will remain problematic.
There were just a pile of major bugs reported for Firefox. They were fixed within days, and decreased privilege should keep the damage to a minimum while the fixes propagate. IE needs to be able to get there. (B)