IronRuby

OK. So here’s the scoop. 2pm at the International Meeting Place (see map). I’m going to be at the Convention Center from around 1:30 onwards. There are a lot of central public meeting places at the convention center. From where I sit at my desk ... [More] this morning, it looks like the “International Meeting Place” on the second floor will do just fine: I’ll hang out there and I’ll be happy to demo / talk about IronRuby, OpenSource and whatever else *you* want to talk about. Follow me on twitter (john_lam) if you want up to the minute updates on where we’ll be just in case this location doesn’t work out. I’ll be giving talks on Ruby in both the C# and VB tracks. Right now it looks like 10:30AM and 12:30pm – check your schedules to make sure – the second talk’s time slot looks fishy to me. BTW, for those of you who are reading this who don’t know what an MVP Summit is, it’s an event where we fly put up in hotels and feed some of our closest supporters to Redmond for a week-long tech love-fest. This is an awesome event since we get a chance to give back to the folks who help us do our jobs here at Microsoft. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]

I have a simple request for you if you are: an MVP (MS Most Valuable Professional) are attending the MVP Summit in Redmond in April want to talk about IronRuby *or* dynamic languages in Silverlight in an ‘Open Spaces’ format ... [More] Please go ahead and nominate us for one or both of these sessions and I’ll show up along with Jimmy Schementi to discuss at the MVP summit. Take advantage of the Open Spaces format – you get to control the agenda! BTW- please leave a comment here if you want to nominate so that we’ll be sure to show up then! Update: Apparently the folks running the “Open Spaces” event at the MVP Summit want to exercise central command and control over the event, quite unlike this definition of a BarCamp from Wikipedia: “The procedural framework consists of sessions proposed and scheduled each day by attendees, mostly on-site, typically using white boards or paper taped to the wall. This has been dubbed, with another play on words, The Open Grid approach.” Apparently nominations are now closed, so we won’t be there to participate, sorry. Update 2: OK. So we’re going to stick it to the man and take matters into our own hands. Follow me on twitter, and we’ll figure out a place to do our own Ruby meetup at the MVP summit. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]

Yep, that’s right. That’s my other job here at the company. This means that I participate in a set of events that have nothing to do with IronRuby as a technology, but have everything to do with IronRuby as part of a movement toward greater ... [More] openness within the company. Last week, I participated in the Microsoft Technical Summit that we held here on campus. Every year we invite a bunch of Microsoft skeptics to campus and subject them to mind conditioning engage in a dialogue with them. I talked about why we were doing Open Source, why we were doing dynamic languages in particular, and showed them a few demos of stuff that works today. It was great to get blunt feedback from folks who took time out of their lives to attend, and hopefully we did move the dial on their perceptions of what we’re up to here at the company. I had a lot of fun talking to Adam Keys who rocked my world with his RubyConf one-man play (warning – you need to either be a Ruby programmer to really appreciate the crazy humor that this is, or be fascinated by what geeks think is funny): On Friday, I participated in our inaugural Open Source Day internal conference at Microsoft. I was on a panel with three other folks: Rob Mensching, who did the first Open Source project at Microsoft – WiX, Shawn Burke, who runs the AJAX Control Toolkit project, and made the .NET library source code available among many other cool things, and Tom Hanrahan who runs our Linux Interoperability lab. We talked about experiences – Rob and Shawn have been at the company a long time and had a ton of fun anecdotes about what it was like to try and do Open Source at the company back in the dark ages. I contributed some stories about how we do IronRuby development and some pointers about how other product groups can think about why and how they should participate in Open Source. Tom was our elder statesman, and talked a lot about why interop is important to our customers (bottom line is that virtually all of our medium to large customers live in a heterogeneous aka non-100% Windows environment). One thing that came out in the discussions is how we need to be better at transparency, even while developing our non-Open Source products. One of the powerful ideas of Open Source is the ability for outsiders to actively participate in the creation of products even if they never crack open the sources themselves. That’s a powerful idea, and one that I think that (at least in Developer Division – where I work) we’re in a great position to deliver on. * I’m a huge fan of vimperator after discovering it via Zed Shaw. If you’ve internalized the vim keybindings, you’ll be surprised at how you can leverage your muscle memory while surfing the web. Permalink | Leave a comment  » [Less]