Conference
Attendance and Microsoft Program
Managers
Reading the blog of
my favorite B0rg cheerleader I came across link
to a
post by Pete Cole where he disputes Scoble's
assertion that Microsoft developers and program
managers will be at conferences like PDC
giving out their contact information to attendees
who'd like to contact them.
From my experience at this year's
TechEd this is exactly the case. If you were a
developer interested in XML or XML Web Services at
TechEd 2003 you could walk up to one of the booths
during the "Ask the Experts" timeslots [which
occured every day] and talk to PMs working on the
core XML APIs and technolgies (like myself and my
boss), the PMs responsible for the XML Web Services
stuff (like Doug, Steve
and Yasser),
MSDN content strategists for XML Web Services (like
Matt),
as well as devs and test folks who work
technologies like SQLXML,
W3C XML Schema and XSLT.
The entire point of Microsoft taking us off
working for a week and sending us to the conference
was exactly so we could hang out wioth customers,
exchange contact info and obtain feedback [as well
as give talks].
Funny enough, half the time we were just standing
idly around the booth with no one coming to talk to
us which worked out fine for the few folks who did
talk to us because they tended to get our undivided
attention. For instance, Tomas
Restrepo walked up to me with a number of
complaints about our core XML APIs like
XPathNavigator, XmlWriter and XmlDocument which I
took to heart and shared with folks like Joshua
when I got back from TechEd. Needless to say the
three primary issues he complained about will be
fixed in the next version of the .NET
Framework.
#
The Mozilla
Foundation: Half-Empty or Half-full?
I read the recent news about AOLs firing of the
core of the Netscape team and donating
their salaries $2 million to start
up the Mozilla foundation. It seems most people on
hearing the news had a cup is half empty or cup is
half full reaction. Slashdot posted two stories
about the event from each perspective
The Web Standards project has a number of
editorials about the recent events. It seems
they've taken a half full perspective on things
which is good.
#Ebay and Blogging
Technologies
After following some links from some blog I can't
even remember I ended up on this post about
posting
to your eBay from your blog posting software and
eBay providing individualized RSS feeds for buyers
and sellers.
The first idea seems like a good one although I'd
quibble about the implementation choices. It would
make more sense for eBay to consider exposing a
blog APi interface so blog posting tools would just
consider posting to eBay as if they were posting to
any other blog than it would be to expect a blog
posting tool to be specially tailored to work with
eBay by supporting the
eBay API.
However looking at the actual description of the
API it doesn't seem to overlap much with what a
blog posting API would look like. Of course, if the
blog posting API was designed as just being about
sending and receiving extensible XML messages then
the differences aren't as stark as you think.
The other idea of providing individualized RSS
feeds for buyers and sellers is actually a pretty
good idea although I wonder why the poster thinks
eBay shouldn't charge for this as a value added
service.
#
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