Geek story of the day!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/13/northern.lights.ap/index.html

At the Mix n Mash  earlier this week, I asked Scott Guthrie what his opinion was about developers having to deal with SO many new technologies coming out from Microsoft at such a rapid pace.

His recommendation was to pick what is core to your work, or what you are really good at or really vested in and then ignore the rest.

Easier said than done.

Even if we follow ONLY his blog, we have myriad technologies in our faces. It’s very hard to predict the future. I am currently “ignoring’ .NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF & Workflow), MVC, AJAX Control Kit, SQL Server 2008, a huge chunk of Silverlight. Granted MVC is far out. Volta just showed up. Astoria is plowing ahead without me at the moment. Surface is astounding. And there’s so much more.

It’s very frustrating because this isn’t Lays potato chips. The one I ignore may have been the one that will make a difference in my ability to support a future client.

What Scott is suggesting is akin to watching t.v. without a remote! 🙂 We’ll see how it goes…

At the recent Mix n Mash 08, Bill Gates talked about how Microsoft creates their vision for software and computing and the acts upon that vision. Read more…

[A New DevLife post]

Oh gawd – I was trying SO hard not to blink and overcompensated and have an odd look on my face. No matter how this looks, no, Jonathan Snook did NOT just pinch me!

From left to right

Jonathan Snook, me, Kelly Goto, Rob Howard, Bill Gates, Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jesse Warden, Keith Peters, Erik Natske.

So I got back to my hotel room after the meeting and was getting a few things from my backpack and was sorely disappointed to find this:

A bottle of Maple Syrup I had brought with me from Vermont to give to Bill Gates. I had totally forgotten in the excitement of the whole day.

So, I very happily gave it to Tim Harris, from the DPE (Develper Platform Evangelism) team who had coordinated the trip and the day. He was already looking forward to the pancakes he plans to have tomorrow morning.

Okay that was fun. I was the third one to ask a question and about one minute before my time there were suddenly about 5000 in my head.

Each person asked a question and each question started him off on an interesting road.

There will be a transcript provided so I’m not going to bother trying to share the entire conversation.

When we first sat down, I feared that my pulse was racing, but then it was easy to get absorbed in what he was talking about.

Interesting to me was his discussion of vision – that a lot of the driving force is based on the dream of what computing should be able to achieve someday.

For me, however, the most exciting thing is that with all of the money and power that Bill Gates wields, he continues to change the world through the Gates Foundation.

I managed to suggest that if he ever wanted to open a Gates Foundation office in Vermont, to give me a call…

We had a group photo that we’ll get along with the transcript.

And no, we didn’t get a zune – but I’ve got my Nano.

I asked Scott Guthrie if there will be any new technologies shown at MIX 08 that NOBODY has ever seen before and his answer was “Yes”. Not just announcements of when something will RTM, but actual new capabilities… can’t wait!

I was invited by the DPE team (Developer Platform Evanglism) along with 9 other people to attend the Mix n Mash 08 event where the MIX team is picking our brains while they formulate Mix08. Right now we are talking wiht Scott Guthrie about where Microsoft is headed with development tools.

Here is the list of people who are attending:

Kip Kniskern – www.liveside.net

Molly Holzschlag – www.molly.com

Jesse Warden – www.jessewarden.com

Jonathan Snook – www.snook.ca/jonathan

Keith Peters – www.bit-101.com

Kelly Goto – www.gotomobile.com

Erik Natzke – http://jot.eriknatzke.com

Julie Lerman – www.thedatafarm.com/blog

Rob Howard – http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward

At the end of the day, we get to spend an hour with Bill Gates. I’m definitely excited about this. My husband has ben making a list of everything worng with his computer and his user experience for the past two months with the hope that I will present it to Bill. But, that’s not going to happen.

Last year, attendees came clean with the admission that they had been given the gift of a Zune for attending. This year, as a joking nod to that, we got cookies that were decorated to look like a Zune. Photo later.

Discussions right now are focused on Microsoft in the mobile space. I also asked about the whole firehose problem – of SOOOO many technologies coming at us. The only way to deal with it of course is to ignore most of it and focus on what you are best at – but man that’s is ONE hard bit of guidance to follow.

With my own focus on data access right now, it means that I’ll be able to get you data but might not be able to help you get it on your form.

Read all about it here…

[A New DevLife post]

Over on CIO.com where CIOs go to get help with technology direction decisions for their companies, Esther Schindler takes a look at the Programming Language Popularity (non scientific) study which analyzed search terms for Yahoo and craigslist, book titles on Amazon.com, languages used in Freshmeat projects and more.

Language choice is a much different decision for CIOs than it is for developers, Esther says.

While she finds the results

“interesting—well, okay, they’re fascinating if you’re a software development and statistics geek like me, and for your sake I hope you aren’t.”

But she’s not keen on their methodology ….  you can read her post here.