I received an email from
Kim Peterson over at the
Seattle Times yesterday since she's going to the conference and was writing a story about it all. She "was hoping to get a sense of how excited the developer community was about Longhorn and about the upcoming glimpse of Longhorn that everyone's going to get". So I replied back and today got a phone call from her. She was really easy to talk to and to be interviewed by. I might have not sounded so stupid as I normally do in interviews since I actually got some sleep the night before (unlike my infamous MVS, err
MSP interview...
Mark you still need to get me that
). In any case it was cool.
She asked me if I thought it was a bit odd that even though a lot of what Microsoft is showing won't be coming around for quite some time in Longhorn that MS was still showing everything off. I basically said that it's probably the most important thing MS could do with these upcoming products because it will allow developers and the public to provide more input at this pre-beta stage of Longhorn which is really the only time we as outsiders can make a drastic difference in the final product. Besides Aero and Avalon I'm really interested in WinFS, Whidbey and ASP.NET 2.0 so I talked a little bit about those. But in general the chat was mainly about the cool
things behind this entire event and the
community that is forming around these new products.
Maybe it's just because I've been talking to loads of softies since I've put up my blog and the PDC countdown but I genuinely feel like something huge is going on lately.