Microsoft Dinner at Eclipse Con 2006!

While at Eclipse Con my counter part Nima and I planned a dinner. We thought it would be great to have a chance to speak to some of the Eclipse contributors about open source and where their respective projects are headed. This was FANTASIC because we had a chance to speak to Mark, Kyle and Matt from RadRails, Richard Hamnett talking about Asterisk and Max Carlson from OpenLaszlo, rich internet applications. We were also pleased to have Tom Crozier and from Microsoft.

Matt, Kyle and Mark are very futuristic and as they said: “The only ones at he exhibit hall with a free product!” They also said: “Everyone else at the exhibit hall is waiting for someone to come up with a piece of code which they can then package and sell, we are the only ones here without a product and everyone is surprised when we tell them we are Free!” RadRails sees offering support as a way to make money and are willing to look into creating a plug for Visual Studio. Ruby on Rails (RoR) for Visual Studio? Now that will be interesting. More about Ruby in VS I still think RoR will be cool for VS.

We are also working with some of the dinner attendees as they had a chance to learn from us what it is like to work at Microsoft and are very interested in an internship opportunity. Amazingly the attendee age was the older wiser however the contributor age and the age of the contributors to Eclipse who are leading is fairly young the early college student age.