iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

Now that the Jet-lag has worn off (all-night flights suck, even when they are first class) I figure it would be the perfect time to blog about my recent visit to Microsoft's Web Dev Summit.

A few weeks ago I got an invite from Brian (who thanks to Wez he got through my spam filters) to come to Microsoft and see what kind of cool stuff they are doing and to give some feedback from the "enemy camp" so to speak on the stuff they are doing. I thought it'd be a great opportunity to see what's going on the other side of the fence and readily agreed.

So, last week, I caught a plane to Redmond where I joined a number of other PHP luminaries (Wez, Marcus, Frank, Laura, etc...) and a lone Ruby developer (Yes, they do exist!). Over the next two days we had a very tightly packed schedule of presentations from Microsoft folks on things ranging from IIS7 to LINQ. Despite the very tight schedule we've got a number of opportunities to have informal talks with Microsoft developers which in my experience were quite interesting. They have certainly seemed open to new ideas, which was a very welcome surprise and were more then willing to listen to constructive criticism (which in some cases we were more then willing to provide ). Continue reading "Microsoft Web Dev Summit Overview"