Woot! I'm in a video on Channel 9

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Glucose/Hanselminutes-on-9-Inside-Secret-Microsoft-Meeting-Rooms-What-Laptop-do-Alpha-Geeks-Use/

Having fun in Redmond!

UPDATE 2009-07-09

Thought I should update this post since it was really more like a tweet than a blog post.

So as you see in the video I was invited out to Redmond for a meeting at Microsoft. I had thought maybe I would be able to talk about it when I got back but I can't talk about it yet. For sure I will be able to tell all about it but not yet, probably in a month but there is not a specific date so don't hold me to it. For now you can be sure that I will talk about it at some point and lets enjoy the mystery and suspense for a little while ;-), but don't expect something really earth shaking or you may be dissappointed. 

I think I can say this without getting into trouble. Microsoft wanted to talk with a number of people about something they thought might interest us, they wanted to know if it does interest us and they wanted input and feedback. There are others that were not in the video or the meeting that are providing their feedback as well so don't over interpret the combination of people in the video. This was during a restroom break so some people were out of the room as well. For my part I can say I am interested in it and indeed excited about it.

Other than that, for the moment I can only share how much I enjoyed this opportunity to meet some folks I've followed in the blogosphere like Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Bertrand Le Roy, as well as some other Microsoft folks who are very brilliant but I had not known of them before. I also got to meet some great folks involved in the Web Application Gallery which was very nice.

You may also be interested in my impressions of the experience visiting the Redmond campus. It turns out they do not all ride around on jetpacks as I had supposed ;-) Nor do they all think with one hive mind, it seems they are all quite individual and have opinions in common with one another and also differing opinons among them just like most cases where there are lots of people. A meeting at Microsoft did not strike me as much different than meetings at other companies. I did not see the entire campus of course, the parts I saw were newer from what I understand. It seemed a lot like a nice college campus appended to a classy mall and food court. I saw the company store and even got to poke around on a Surface in the little museum they have.

I also got to meet Shaun Walker and Scott Willhite of DotNetNuke. You may wonder what was it like fraternising with the competition. While we acknowledged that we do compete I found them to be really nice guys who I have a lot in common with and I felt some sense of kinship with because of our common heritage in IBuySpy and because it was easy to talk with them about our experiences as open source developers in the .NET world. I have always admired and respected what DotNetNuke has accomplished as a succesful open source project and now that I know what nice guys they are I admire and respect them even more. I would even say that their success has been a model which gives me hopes that I can achieve my own aspirations for mojoPortal. They proved it was possible to build a business around open source in the Microsoft stack and I'm not sure I would have thought it possible enough to pursue it myself had they not done it first.  I was very glad to become friends with them. I have not yet achieved the business success that I'm hoping for with mojoPortal but I feel I am making progres and will get there.

Bottom row Bertrand Le Roy, Phil Haack, and Bradley Millington, top row myself and Shaun Walker, this was at dinner, not the greatest photo, my iPhone is not the new model so the camera is not so good especially in dark lighting.