I attended a meeting between Eric Rudder - Senior VP of Servers and tools at MSFT, and several Microsoft employees and external Microsoft technology leaders in Israel. I was sort of a Q & A meeting where people could ask what they wanted and he just sat there and answered.

He's a pretty cool guy (and has good sense of humor). I can't say that I learned too much from the meeting. Personally I think people were not open enough and not felt open enough to ask really hard questions, or that maybe they were not prepared to ask questions. We came more in expectation to hear him speak and learned in the final minute that we were supposed to move the meeting ourselves. If I'd known that I'd make a big list of questions to ask.

Second thing - it was way too short. I didn't get to ask all the three questions I had for him.

 

But here's a nice anecdote:

That same day , a few hours before the meeting, I emailed him with this letter (I guess his email alias from his blog address.. duh):

To: Eric Rudder
Subject: .Net Blogger geek meets Eric Rudder at Microsoft Israel. Myth or fact? you decide.

 Hi Eric.

You may not know me (there's an understatement for ya..) but my Name is Roy Osherove and I'm a .Net developer/Consultant here in Israel.

I'm also an MVP for .Net and work at Magen – Microsoft Technology Center here in Israel.I'll be at MS Israel today at 17:00 at the talk you are going to give and can't wait to talk to you in person.

I also run a fairly well known .Net weblog: www.iserializable.com (which is an alias for http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove  ) In which I write about .Net and Test Driven Development and other interesting stuff. 

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that Israel has now started to become part of the global blogsphere community and a lot of people are passionate about .Net. I've also noticed that you started your own blog a while ago but it looks like you have not enough time to actually write to it. That's a shame. 

Lastly – I wanted to let you know that I think Microsoft's new found openness to the community via blogs and forums and channel9 and all those other places has greatly reduced the amount of pain a lot of the Developers have had to endure while doing real world applications. There's just more information out there and I'd like to say here "please continue this trend!!"

In my blog I am sometimes critical of certain Microsoft aspects, but always as constructive criticism. I hope that MS continues to listen to its customers by reading blogs and other media generated by us "small" developers, because it leads to amazing customer feedback and loyalty.

OK. Enough babbling for now. I'll try to meet you today and maybe if you have time we can talk in person.Also, wishfully thinking, you can reach me on MSN IM via RoyOsherove at Hotmail.com .

Cheers, and welcome to Israel.

[Picture of me from the blog] 

(That's me, only now I have shorter hair.._

---------------END SNIP --------------------------------

At the meeting the first thing he said was "ISerializable dot com?" and looked for me in the audience. I raised my hand and he said "you're lucky I checked my email just before.." and that was about it. the meeting went without any further interference but I felt good. Sort of a little "I'm listening" kinda thing.

Anyway - a day or two after the meeting I get an email back from him saying he wanted to leave a comment on my blog when I post about the meeting but he so no such post. Sorry Eric :) here it is.

I did take advantage of the fact that he actually responded to me and asked him some of the questions that were on my mind:

"SQL service broker is one of the things I'm most impressed about. Is this going to be the next-Gen MSMQ?  

Small comment about tools – vs 2005 in particular: I think MS should look to JetBrain's IntelliJ IDEA editor to gain more knowledge of features I'd like to see in vs 2005 some day. It is an amazing IDE and MS would do great to learn some important lessons in usability and interactivity in many regards. 2005 takes a step in the right direction but right now is no where near what IDEA has to offer. It made my Java experience a joy (and I don't really know java – imagine that…) 

Another subject I wanted to ask you about was the whole issue of extensibility in the developer tools. How long will we suffer with COM objects and interfaces instead of using straightforward reflection and late binding? Will steps be taken in that direction?"

his reply:

"We have done more than look at IntelliJ – we have actually visited their development team (in part to encourage their team to expand their .net language support) … I think folks will enjoy the refactoring support that we’ve added to VS, and I am confident this will continue to improve over time.  I know this can really have a big impact on “enjoyment” – especially if you are in the IDE for several hours per day!

I am glad you like SQL Broker – I think our long term strategy is really WS-Reliable Messaging, and we will have both Indigo and SQL be compliant towards the spec.  The feature is really nice for folks that use the design pattern of q’ing requests in the DB … a lot of folks had to cobble this up themselves w. SQL and MSMQ and I think we will make those folks very happy.

We are definitely moving more and more towards .NET – COM interop will remain important for a long time, but if you have some interfaces that “bother you” more than others, please make sure to let the team know."

Thanks for taking the time to answer, Eric :)