Dinner with a Gaggle of Geeks

Trip down to Microsoft was pretty good. Had great weather and enjoyed listening to Diana Krall’s new CD I got for Father's Day as I drove down to Redmond. Had a chance to hook up with a few people on the Microsoft campus, and even had an opportunity to check out some of Microsoft's latest security work during their Trustworthy Computing Fest.

The turn out for the dinner was nice. Good size to allow me to talk with a lot of people and not feel overwhelmed. My apologies to a few people that I didn’t get to spend some time with. It was nice hooking up with Ivan from the Secure Windows Initiative Attack team, and discuss some of the internal security tools Microsoft is using that I was exposed to during the day at the trustworthy computing fest.

I also enjoyed debating the integration of unit testing in all dev products from Microsoft with Jason Anderson and Tom Arnold from the Visual Studio Team System group. With the latest petition that I signed being one of the reasons Jason came out, I enjoyed our discussion on what was coming out of Microsoft. During our discussions it got to a point that it was apparent that being able to see the integration in Team System may do more to answer my concerns than anything. So with that challenge, Jason tool a group of us back to the campus and had a complete demo of their current work. It was fascinating. So much so that I believe it deserves its own entry, so I am going to blog that separately.

I love these geek dinners. Thanks to Robert Scoble for hosting it and putting me up for the night. It was a great experience. It was too bad that we didn’t get time to do some 'wine and wireless' when we got back to his place. Enjoy the bottle of wine Robert. It is a favorite gewürztraminer from my private stock.