I was invited to the Microsoft Technology Summit 2006 (MTS06). The conference happened in Seattle, in Microsoft campus at Redmond. This year there were 40 people all luminaries selected from communities competing with MS technologies (Open Source, PHP, Java, etc). MS offices in different countries proposed several candidates which were then reviewed. I heard there were several criteria (having written 2 books, having a web site with more than so many visits per day, working on so many open source projects within known communities, etc). In my case, I was proposed by Steve Sfartz from MS France, along with 3 other frenchmen: Didier Girard of application-servers.com fame, and Romain Bourdon and Cyril Pierre de Geyer from PHP France, AFUP and contributors to PHP open source projects. All expenses were paid by MS.

There were 2 main goals for this conference:

• Reduce "FUD" spread by influential non-MS technology users by showing them what MS is actually working on. It's harder to spread FUD when you know the details...
• Get feedback from competitive technology users to improve MS products/technologies

I applaud MS for having the foresight (and the money) to do this. It takes some vision and courage to set this up and allow everyone to blog freely about it.

Here are the topics we were shown during these 3 days:

• Scripting and dynamic languages by Jim Hugunin
• .NET CLR 2.0 Reliability by Allesandro Catorcini
• GotDotNet and Communities by Korby Parnell
• Open Source at Microsoft by Bill Hilf
• Microsoft Research by Rick Rashid
• WCF & WS-* by Don Box
• Internet Explorer by Dean Hachamovitch
• LINQ/C# by Luca Bolognese, Anders Hejlsberg
• Executive General Session by Sanjay Parthasarathy
• XBOX Extensibility by Brian Keller
• WPF – next generation UI by Chris Anderson
• Windows Server “Longhorn” as an App Server by Doug Purdy
• ASP.NET/IIS7/Atlas by Scott Guthrie
• InfoCard by Mike Jones
• Windows Mobile/Embedded by Mike Hall and David Karle
• eScience – the Next Decade. Lessons learned and the path forward from TerraServer, SkyServer and bio-informatics by Jim Gray
• Software Factories by Jack Greenfield

What was the outcome? Was it effective?

It was certainly good to be invited (many thanks to Steve for that). The presentations were of mixed quality and I felt that the topics were too broad. There were some that were of interest to me but lots of others were not in my area of expertise/interest. I've also felt that there were not enough participation to meet the original goal defined by MS.

I'd like to believe Microsoft was serious about the feedback we gave them but I'm not sure how much I can believe this... The reason I have some doubt is because the sessions were not meant to gather feedback but rather to explain how things are done at Microsoft. If the goal of this conference is to get feedback then I think the format of the presentations could be much improved. Here are some ideas for next year (in case there's a MTS07):

• Mix formal presentations with round tables sessions. Get 10 persons per table with each table having a Microsoft coach to drive discussions. Have different topics per table and let attendees pick the topics that interest them.
• Use the SPA conference session formats as exemples. This idea is to have more workhop sessions than formal presentations to get everyone's participation and to get deliverables as part of the session's outputs.
• Feedback from everyone was provided at different point in time and to different Microsoft employees. The feedback was received verbally and there's currently no guarantee that the feedback will be remembered and acted upon. I'd suggest to have a large white board that is used throught the conference to record all ideas for improvement. This will also stimulate feedbacks.
• Report on all feedback submitted during the previous conference at the begining on the conference to show what impact the feedback has had.

Note that I have received an email from MS pointing to survey where MS is asking for feedback. I'd still prefer giving the feedback during the conference and directly to the concerned people but with a way of ensuring that this feedback will be tracked (whether it is used or not doesn't matter that much, what's important to me is that it is considered and that I know of the outcome).

All in all a very good week and in addition were had some nice treats: a welcome basket of eatable goodies and ... a one-year MSDN subscription! Now that's very nice and I'm pretty sure last year's participant must be jealous by now ;-). BTW, on this topic of presents, there were some real disapointments when MS announced that we would have a 120$ voucher to buy stuff at the MS company store ... and when we later learned that this voucher was only the right to spend up to 120$ at the store! I'd suggest to remove this next year as most around me (including me) have found this more negative than positive. Of course the announcement of the MSDN subscription the day after helped a lot overcome this negative feeling ;-). We're too spoiled for sure...

Once more, thanks Steve and Microsoft for this very nice week!