Mix, Bug Bounties, Vacation and More!

Well, I'm back from Vacation and feeling absolutely FAN-FREAKIN-TASTIC!  I did absolutely nothing while sitting on the beach and beside the pool in Ixtapa, Mexico.  And I gotta say, it was out of this world.  I've not felt so relaxed and ready to come to work in a while.  That was much needed!!

Before I left, I had announced a Bug Bounty, and thanks to Raj Kaimal, I got repro steps for the bug!  I handed it off to the devs before I left, and to much to my satisfaction, when I got back, there was an email in my inbox letting me know that the dev's had fixed the bug!  So, hopefully that'll mean we'll see it in the service pack when it comes out!  So, special thanks to Raj and his friend for their hard work!

The cool thing about this whole bug bounty, I talked to my lead, some marketing guys, and a few other important people, and it looks like we might be rolling this out officially for Orcas!  No promises yet, but it looks like both the design time and the run time team are going to participate, and we'll have a special site for you to help us out.  The prizes will be varied, and and likely you'll get some choice in what you get.  We're still figuring out all the details, but this is a great way to get you involved, and help us out with some of those hard to repro bugs!

Mix 06 is coming up!  I'm really excited about it.  I really want to go, but not sure what if I'm going to be able to yet.  They're strictly limiting the number of MS folk so as to make it more a conversation about web technologies, not just a Microsoft technology type conference like PDC or TechEd.  The idea being that there are plenty of people there other than just MS staff.  eBay, Amazon and other big name web companies are big participants, so it should be pretty awesome.  Check it out, if you can go, I'd highly recommend it.  I think this is going to be the conference to be at this year.