Last week I attended the ASPInsiders Summit at the MS main campus in Redmond. I must say that by Wednesday afternoon my head was ready to explode with the amount of content that I, along with another Insiders, parsed through!! However, it was a great opportunity to provide feedback the teams that make up the ASP.NET Team.
Over all, it was a great way to experience the process in which MS takes customers feedback and prioritizes features for their products. Sure, we all build products, but I must say that we don't do it at the scale that Microsoft does. The impressive thing about this is the size of the team! Now, I don't know the exact number but from the looks of it from the people coming in and out, the team is about ~30 people. Pretty impressive number for such an awesome platform!
Now, I can't say much about what was discussed (since most of it is under NDA), but I can say this: The team is very passionate about delivering a great product and customer experience. Every time you spoke with a member of the team, they were very attentive and always asked the "What would you like out of the product?" and "How would you do it?"...pretty awesome.
I must say that the highlights of the trip was spending time with the ASP.NET MVC team (both framework and tooling) and get to know them both as individuals and peers. Sure we talked shop, and lots and lots of it, but it was nice to hear about their personal lives for a change. Now, the one thing I will say (over a series of more blog posts) is that I was enlightened on the perception that over ASP.NET developers have about the new MVC framework. The main thing I hear from the group was "explain to me why/how..." Now, all of these are valid questions anybody exploring a new technology/approach should always ask. The interesting thing about these lines of questions is that it shows that we've (those proponents of MVC) have not been doing a good enough job explaining the zen of asp.net mvc. From my point of view, this is totally our fault for focusing on the specifics rather than the abstractions. This is something that I know was realized by the MVC Mafia (thanks Alan Stevens for coming up the name!) and that we're working on changing. So stay tuned!
Any way, back to the post...
As I said, it was a real pleasure for me to be a part of this summit. I met a lot really cool people and I must say that I can't wait until Insiders09. Also, I would like to thank those involved in putting it together, particularly Scott Galloway! You guys just rocked the event!!