Anders Hejlsberg Visits with HS CS Teachers

This must be my trip to Redmond to meet famous Microsoft people. Yesterday I spent some time with Robert Scoble (famous Microsoft Geek Blogger and founding member of the Channel 9 Team). Robert and I have met before and we had a great conversation. Today I got to meet Anders Hejlsberg. Anders came to talk about LINQ which is a new data feature for C# and Visual Basic .NET. Anders also talked about LINQ at a recent Channel 9 video. Anders is a great speaker. He is also quite approachable. I've met super smart, really technical people who are difficult and intimidating to talk to. Anders is not one of those people. He was just great about explaining a complex topic and answering questions from the people in the room. I think the audience was impressed with his talk. I know I was. If you ever get a chance to here him talk be sure to do so.

The occasion for this meeting was a Faculty Advisory Board meeting that we are running in Redmond this week. We have 10 high school teachers here for two days of meetings. Anders was one of the guest speakers we brought in to talk to them so that we can introduce them to what is coming from Microsoft. We will be asking them for feedback in the future. We are really interested in seeing how our tools can be more effective in the educational process. Advisory groups are one of the ways we try to listen to customers.

Another way is through blogging. I asked for teacher feedback on Visual Studio .NET in an earlier blog entry . If you have thoughts I’d love to hear them.

- Alfred Thompson