SF/JavaOne, Day 2, The Booth

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Helped out at the MS booth in the Pavilion for a bit today. 
Contrary to my expectations we were absolutely packed, with a line that
stretched far out and wrapped around.  The conversations mostly
involved ways that java and .net could interoperate, and topics that
ranged from Web Services to DB agnosticism were discussed.  It
looks like there are a lot of shops out there doing joint or cross
platform development with J2EE and .Net and are looking for every way
to make that cheaper and easier for them.  It was also really
great because there was a lot of banter from the crowd about people
talking about ASP/JSP and which was superior.  It was cool to see
so much passion for this technology as well as getting a sence that
people really like how fast the industry is moving forward and what
it's bringing all of htem. There was also a lot of interest in VS 2005
Beta2 once we started talking about the new technologies we were
introducing in Team Server and how they could be helpful for
development teams in creating software.

One of the topics i kept hearing a lot of was OR-mappings and what MS'
story was here.  Unfortunately, this isn't an area that i know a
lot about, but i think it's pretty clear that i should learn since it
is something that seems to be affecting a whole lot of people.

Hrmm... suddenly a whole lot of press shows up.  They're
surrounding someone who looks familiar but i can't quite put my finger
on it.  Then i hear a whisper: "McNealy".  Bingo!  Looks
like he came down to take a look and chat for a bit with the MS guys
running the booth.  Pretty cool to see, and they all sounded
pretty about the competition that's arising over web standards and who
can deliver the best "stack" around that.  I'll definitely have to
spend some more time in the booth so i can talk to my Java p33ps some
more about what we can be doing for them.

Ok.  Off to the Eclipse technical session.  This is something
i've been looking forward to for a long time and i'm really excited to
see what they have to show off here.