A few of the blogs that I like to check out are going on about the upcoming Microsoft PDC. Obviously these are blogs written by MSFT employees, because not many other people would be talking about the MSFT Primary Devs. Conference. And really, MSFT conferences are not that informative. Or interesting.

I had the (mis)fortune to attend a .NET conference a few years ago. Actually, there was a lot of talk about Active Directory in there too. Anyhow the conference just seemed unfocused. What the hell was .NET? Was it the hailstorm initiative? A Development platform? An application framework? An Operating System? Hype? All of the above?

If you picked Hype, you came closest to the correct answer. Other than C#, which is (let's be honest) a bad Java clone and ASP.NET which is (let's be honest, far behind any java application server framework) there wasn't that much substance. And all I took out of the conference was some marketing material and a few cd-roms. The 'softies there were rather.... evasive... when asked questions.

Case in point: XML. The softies were on about how XML was going to be *the* way to store data in the .NET world. Everything was XML, and XML was everything. Very zen that. But when you asked them specifically where they'd be using XML, things got fuzzy. Word? Sure, kind of. Resource files? Maybe.

An idea guys... start with the registry. A registry done in XML would make life sooo much easier when you're trying to figure out what's changed on your mission critical server when the last SP made your 3rd party component go belly up. Just backup regularly and run diff.....

Compare that to JavaONE, which I attended this spring. Other than breaking my wrist, it was pretty informative. The Sun people were pretty open about their products and knew what they were talking about. For example, when I asked one of the Sun engineers a question about a feature in a JSF demo I saw, they told me that was a feature the Oracle guys wrote that would be in Oracle's product, not Sun's. D'ya think a vole engineer would ever admit that a competitor's product would have features their's didn't? In front of a group of people?

Bringing it home is this little analogy I heard from someone who's attended more than a few industry shows. When Scott McNealy walks a conference floor, he does it anonymously and mingles with people. When Bill Gates walks a conference floor, he does it with bodyguards in tow. And that perfectly reflects the attitudes towards developers that both companies have. Sun wants to talk to you and wants to hear what you have to say. Microsoft wants to tell you how it will be.

And you thought tornado's were a midwestern trailer park type thing.

You were wrong. We got one here in NJ today. It sounded like my roof was going to be ripped off the apartment this morning, and, for once, it wasn't the various tree rodents that seem to live up there.

Unforutnately, I heard this wind whipping at about 8.30 in the morning. While I was asleep. I, uh, left my PDA at work, and without it being 2 rooms making it's insanely loud chirp I just can't wake up. FYI, nobody makes a louder pda buzzer than PSION. Nobody.

Just ask all the people in the office who heard it go off at 8AM.