Stop 3: Munich, Germany

  • Article

We are in Deutschland now and we visited the Microsoft Technology Center at Munich yesterday. It was a very nice set of buildings, and the meeting rooms are much more impressive than building 41 back in Redmond. They have multiple projectors and multiple LCD screens in the meeting room. Fancy.

 

P1060840

A picture of MTC Munich from the front entrance.

P1060841

Another shot of MTC Munich with the Microsoft sign.

The event that we spoke at was different than the others we had so far. This one was hosted at the Microsoft Technology Center and a small group of VIPs were invited to this event. Only 15 VIPs were there, but this gave us an opportunity to make the event more interactive and intimate. The VIPs were a mixed crowd of architects, ISVs and executives. Their VSX experience was also mixed. Some have in-depth knowledge of certain areas already, while other were new and wanted to find out what all the excitement around it is about.

We spent 3 hours at this event to speak about various VSX topics. It was a great group of folks, many of whom gave us great feedback:

  • VS platform API needs to improve and be modernized. We know about this one already, and I assured them that this will start to happen soon with the next release of Visual Studio.
  • DSL needs to support multiple views of the same underlying model. This is actually the third time in 3 cities that we have heard this feedback.
  • Bidirectional DSL should be supported in the VS SDK. In a private session in the morning, Jean-Marc showed a bidirectional DSL that he has built. It's actually a WCF Designer that many people have found very useful. We should make it easier for folks to build bidirectional DSLs.

At the end of the session, I got my first German form of applause. Apparently, they don't clap; instead everyone knocked on the table to express their appreciation. It was nice.

The visit was also a great chance for us to meet some of the good folks at MTC Munich in person. In particular, I have corresponded with Tim Fischer several times over the past year but I have never met him in person. So it was really nice to put a face to his name. Funny how sometimes you form images of people from the emails you get from them. Tim is much younger and much taller than I had imagined. Christian Binder and Peter Kirchner also met with us during the day and helped us a lot in making the event a success. Thanks guys!

 

- James