www.nickhodge.com

Seven days of internal meet­ings and thou­sands of like-minded geeks can turn phys­ic­ally pear shaped. The con­tent, if you have spent the last few months with your brain pur­posely set on idle, is just what the doc­tor ordered. All the Microsoft people I have met have been friendly, help­ful and way smarter than me. And there is a dis­tinct, res­on­at­ing tone of listen­ing. I am here to listen, so Microsoft doesn’t go pear shaped.

In the spirit of listen­ing; it applies to internal con­ver­sa­tions too. This week, Seattle, Wash­ing­ton, could have eas­ily been Seattle, West­ern Aus­tralia. Which brings me to the hero of the week: Michael Kleef. More guts than the rest of the room com­bined, he had the heart to ask the dif­fi­cult ques­tion about Exchange and global timezones: and through it became the Meme of the Week.

The two high­lights of the week have been see­ing Sir Bill Gates (although I note my esteemed col­legue from the UK, Paul Foster, did not cor­rectly refer to the Chair­main in this man­ner). Excel­lent view of the state of the tech­no­logy and bio­logy world. The other high­light was see­ing BMW’s Dir­ector of Design: Chris Bungle present on Design as a meta concept.

The Star­bucks virus star­ted rep­lic­a­tion in Seattle. If you want to see your Star­bucks future, with a Star­bucks on every corner and in every hotel and arcade: visit Seattle. As a bright spark from New Zea­l­and noted, it will be good to get home to real cof­fee. Not Star­bucks. In fact, the best cof­fee I’ve had all week has been a French Pas­ti­er­rie near Pike’s Wharf.

After intro­du­cing Jesse to Canada’s last res­id­ent comedi­ans, Trailer Park Boys, I think he’s given up on post­ing the pic­tures of our out­ing to the edge of Puget Sound. Believe me, some of us did get out of the Hotels/Meeting Rooms into the harsh morn­ing sea air of Puget Sound.

So I love Dynamic Lan­guages. It has been inter­est­ing to hear the internal con­ver­sa­tions related to C# and dynamic lan­guages like Javas­cript. In my deeper learn­ing of Microsoft, I had watched some of the Chan­nel 9 videos of the lan­guage guru Anders Hejls­berg. There are some more dynamic “things” inside C# 2.0 (and the forth­com­ing C# 3.0) that make it and the CLR more dynamic.

Per­fect evid­ence of this is the Iron­Py­thon pro­ject. I have yet to get some cycles to pump out a pro­ject like Jon Udell. Or maybe I’ll go down the Ruby route thanks to some smart guys in Queens­land, Aus­tralia: Ruby.Net. After see­ing the ASP.NET Ajax stuff: from a Javas­cript and PHP per­spect­ive, I am all inspired to do some cool stuff. And see if MVC relates to these environments.

Office 2007. Now even Mac users are say­ing the inter­face shows that Microsoft can do innov­at­ive user inter­faces. Yeah. And there’s a lot more inside Office 2007 that I will get to show off. There’s cool stuff inside IE7 related to RSS that are excel­lent for mak­ing your site more approach­able, too.

Nextly, on to the “onboard­ing” train­ing. This will make me less organ­isa­tion­ally pear-shaped. Or so the HR and man­age­ment the­ory goes…