Leinninger.com

October 28th, 2007:
Arrival at the Microsoft Web Development Technology Summit

The flight into Seattle was cozy (I’m 6’3″ and 250 lbs.) and the landing was interesting. There must have been high winds, because the 757 landed at a 20 degree angle (known as crabbing). After an audible gasp from the passengers, we straightened out and were just fine.

The accommodations are very nice and the welcome mixer/dinner was better than I thought it would be. I’m not really a social butterfly and dealing with crowds of strangers is not my forte. However, the crowd was smaller than I expected and everyone was very friendly. Microsoft had a decent showing of folks to chat with about their web technologies and server solutions. These folks weren’t reps or advocates, but hands-on developers and product managers. Very nice.

It appears that Microsoft has taken a more collaborative approach to PHP (and Ruby for that matter) rather than a competitive one. Much of the summit will focus on integrating PHP with Microsoft solutions as well as collecting feedback form the development community.

So far I’ve met folks from Facebook, Simple Test, PHPDoc (PEAR), PDO, and of course, Microsoft. I feel a bit out of place as a team leader and end user of this technology, but the collective experience is pretty darn awesome.

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