Attended the Microsoft Technology Summit
In the middle of March I was invited to attend the “Microsoft Technology Summit” on their Redmond campus, all expense paid. I was fortunate to be 1 of 30 guests Microsoft had brought to Redmond to in order to “reach out” and listen to Java community leaders around the country. There were a few notable and influential people in the Java community at large (large community site owners, Java authors, etc.) as well as talented Java-oriented developers. MSFT pulled out many high-ranking MSFT product managers and development leads to talk to us and get feedback from the community.
I won’t go into too many details as the proceedings have been blogged by others quite thoroughly in the links below, but I will mention a few of my own unique takeaways.
- Microsoft has lots of smart guys, and anyone who buys into “they are all Bill Gates borgs” mentality is ignorant. They are all pretty open-minded and weren’t shy about pointing out their past foibles (at least some of them).
- Microsoft software is getting more secure. It’s not 100% secure, no code is, but it is increasingly getting more secure. The fact that there are over 660 million users of Windows users it’s no surprise they’re going to be a large target of attacks.
- They are increasing the rate of progress and innovation of their .NET platform such that the makers of the JDK and Java IDEs should be quaking in their boots. Java is great and rich and does a lot of things that .NET doesn’t do so well but MSFT is closing the gap quicker then Sun and the Java community is at extending their “lead”. Some that say “Java is the next COBOL” have a valid point as long as they continue to be as complex, cumbersome, and slow to innovate the language and it’s runtime environment. Some of the demos of .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 had some of the Java developers drooling at the mouth and saying under their breaths “why can’t we have that in Java/our Java IDE?”.
- Before you call me a MSFT rah-rah, many in the group had plenty to gripe about without too many happy responses back from MSFT, particularly in the area of interoperability. Much like how MSFT has told their hardware vendors to write to Windows HALs (hardware abstraction layers) they are telling the enterprise world the way to interop with MSFT is via Web Services, its de facto software abstraction layer of choice. All future MSFT products will have WS APIs into all of their products. This didn’t seem to make enough people happy, and the example of MSFT publishing a JDBC driver for SQL Server was example of what they’d like to see more of: MSFT providing compile time or dynamic libraries (Java, DLLs, etc.) to their products. But I can see how that is more cost-prohibitive for MSFT and having a common set of doors (WS APIs) into their products is easier for them then trying to write custom layers for all of their products (Java JARs, RPC APIs, DLLs, .cpp files, etc.)
- Open Source: MSFT has backed away from “GPL is evil” to embracing some of the tennets of open source, but they still don’t like GPL because it’s too restrictive on IP rights. The minute something GPL-ed ends up in or even near Windows source code they fear all legal hell will break loose so they don’t want to touch GPL with a 10ft pole.
Links about conference
JavaLobby - Summary | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3
MSDN Channel9 Wiki
Steve Raible - Day 1 part 1 | Day 1 part 2 | Day 2 | Pics
Jason Zander (.NET CLR Product Mgr)
Tim Heuer, Microsoft Developer Evangelist
