Indigo briefing

[UPDATE: Check out Don, Doug, Richard and Eric on the latest .NET Show talking about Connected Systems - highly recommended! ]

Last week I was in Redmond attending an internal session on Indigo and it was amazing!!

Don Box's talk was awesome as usual... I always enjoy his talks as he's got a great presentation style. You know what's cool about Don's presentations though is that you can totally tell he used to be a trainer as he's got the magic touch of 1) know your stuff inside and out 2) actually be able to present what you know in a format that doesn't bore people to death and 3) Present the stuff that you know from the perspective of how people will be able to grasp the concepts the easiest. Too often you get someone doing a presentation who knows their stuff cold but either can't present well very well, or is just up there reciting facts. Mind you I think he's gotta be careful as he does seem to have a fascination with those oh so funky architectural words (you know, all those great ones like causality, meta data model, idempotent, and my favorite is orthogonal...<G>) come to think of it, it would be good if Don and his team came up with a new word to replace "so" at the beginning of sentences (you know the classic "So... Indigo is... " "So... good question" "So... lets get started" "So... the data model"...Don actually had some fun with this during his talk and tried to create a rule where anytime someone started off with "So..." everyone would yell "WHAT!!!". Killer idea but it lasted about 5 minutes as he had to exclude himself from the rule. Yup, Don's talks are always informative and always entertaining that's foh shizzle!!

Also got a chance to have a beer with Richard Turner which was cool as he's a wealth of knowledge on Indigo (specifically a great resource on preparing for Indigo today as you can see by checking out his Channel 9 videos here, here, and here). Besides that he's a really cool guy. Richard used to work with my Biztalk superstar colleague Jim Bowyer in the UK (who was also at the Indigo briefing with me) before moving to Redmond to become an Indigo dude.

I'll hold off from doing an Indigo core dump here as I'll post a good entry on getting started with Indigo after this MSDN Canada Connected Systems Deep Dive tour is winding down. In the meantime you can read a few articles on the Indigo site (Longhorn Pillars) here. You can also checkout Don's Indigo talk on theserverside.net here (bonus points for anyone who counts the # of "So...." -- Mind you I'm one to talk so I should just shuddup about this ;-) and his tour on Channel 9 here