The conference was very well organized and the training room was superb. Thanks Vincent for setting this up.

I've made my slides available here.

I'm extremely excited on several accounts:

• I'll be coming back to my first love which is software development. Even though I've continued doing development over all those years it was mostly during my free time, working on open source projects (mostly Cactus, Maven and Cargo). I'm glad to be able to bring software development in my day time job.
• I've spent the last 9 years doing consulting (IT Architecture consulting and then Offshore software development consulting). I was keen to build a product and focus on that single job. I'll still do varied jobs of course but it'll be centered around a product.
• I strongly believe wikis are only just entering the general market. They were niche tools so far but I have the feeling they're going to get more mainstream in the coming years. Of course XWiki is not just a simple wiki, it's actually a second generation wiki, on which collaborative web application can be developed (in short, take almost any "Web 2.0 application" - whatever it means! - and XWiki is a good candidate for building it).

I'm now off to Javapolis 2006 where I'll be manning the XWiki booth with Ludovic and Guillaume. Come and say hello to us!

We were lucky to have Jason Van Zyl talk about new Maven2 stuff and especially the Repository Manager and the maven.org development platform. Emmanuel Venisse has done a presentation on Continuum, Fabrice Bellingard has presented a return of experience of implementing Maven in a large company and I have done a quick presentation of new quality features in Maven2. See Jean-Laurent's blog entry for more details.

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!

"During this Vincent Massol interview you'll receive more information on the status, philosophy and strenghts of Maven 2.0. "What were the shortcomings in Maven 1 and how do we now write maven 2 plugins ?" are just a few questions Dion Almaer asked. Other topics discussed are Continuum, Cargo and Agile outsourcing and offshoring... check it out."

The video is available here.

It appears that Microsoft is serious about Java and Open Source after all. They contacted me for my work on Maven. As a matter of fact, their own MSBuild system is not working as well as they would have liked and they are interested in reusing Maven as a build scaffolding and develop numerous Java and .Net plugins on top of it and integrate it all in the next version of Visual Studio (which will sport lots of new features for Java development too). This is all part of their new 2007 plans for implementing Software Factories. I can't tell you much more at this stage.

The best news is that I won't be working alone on this as they are setting up a full scale Java Team. Yeah that rocks! Some friends from our Open source group in Paris have also been recruited (check Ludovic's , Jeremi's , Didier's and Francois's blogs).

I'll be blogging more about it, stay tuned...

Update (3rd April 2006): Of course this was an April's fool. However there's some truth in it. I'm indeed going to Redmond the week of the 10th of April. Microsoft is inviting 70 people using competing technologies from all over the world. The idea seems to be twofolds: Microsoft will present what they are working on and we are expected to critique/provide feedback on what they're doing compared to what we are doing using our technologies. Sounds pretty fun. It seems this is something similar to the event that Matt Raible attended (more here, here and here). I'll blog more on this when I know more.

I was lucky to be presenting in Room 1 (the big one) and it was well packed. Here are the questions I asked the audience last year:

"The room was packed (I'd say around 400 to 600 people). Before starting with my session I've asked how many people are already using Maven and I've counted about 20 (but at that time the room was only half-packed), so I'd say it was about 3-5%. My second was "How many are planning to use Maven" and I got a resounding 3/4th of the people raising their hand. That shows that Maven is still in it's early adoption phase and that it has some great potential."

This year when I asked the audience who is using Maven 1, I got about 30%-35% hands raised. Wow! This is a huge boost from the 3%-5% of last year! There were also about 5% people already using Maven 2 so that's great too. It seems Maven's adoption is well on its way

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome during the presentation.

Enjoy the slides while waiting for Javapolis to broadcast the videos.

This is a sad moment. Our friend and colleague Nicolas Chalumeau has departed this world on the 4th of October at the age of 27.

The Apache Software Foundation would like to express its condolences to Nicolas' family and friends.

Nicolas had been developing open source software at Apache for several years. He was participating in several projects including Jakarta Cactus and Apache Maven. But even more importantly than helping those projects, what made Nicolas stand apart was his kindness and his generosity. He was always open to discussion and was constantly helping others. On the Cactus project he was regularly the first to answer questions from newcomers trying to use Cactus.

Recently he had taken up the important task of helping migrate Cactus to use Cargo and he had been working diligently towards that task. Actually Nicolas had been doing such a great job on the Cactus project that the Cactus committers had unanimously voted him in to become a committer. Nicolas was voted an Apache committer on the 1st of August 2005. I had several discussions with Nicolas about this new role and he was extremely happy to be part of the Apache Foundation.

Nicolas, we'll miss you, but the work you have done for the community will be remembered forever and will live on. All our thoughts and good wishes are with you and your loved ones.

-Vincent on behalf of the Apache community

(we have also created a special farewell page for Nicolas on the Cactus website).

It addresses different types of concern: from culture to communications to technical infrastructure to development practices.

Now just before you rush to it, you should know that it's written in French. I'm really sorry about that. I would have much preferred to write it in English but Pivolis' first market is currently France.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Note: On the Pivolis web site, don't click on the English flag. The English version of the site is not yet up to date and you won't find the White Paper there.

In preparation for the launch of Maven: A Developer's Notebook, Tim and I have created the Mavenbook.org web site. By using it you'll be able to track the progress of the book but more importantly it'll allow you to download the book's source code, get additional samples, read tips and tricks on using Maven, etc. All of this through a blog interface.

BTW, we're not web designers so we've used a skin found on OSWD. I really like this web site which has both free skins and premium ones.

Last, the icing on the cake, the web site has been done using XWiki. Yeah, you heard it right, there is a wiki under the hood, which allow us to easily edit any page online. Each news item is actually a wiki page to which we have associated an Article object. The home page has a simple macro that does a search for all pages with articles and matching some criteria. Cool, no?

Enjoy!

I've also written 2 Maven quizzes for JavaBlackBelt.com. If you want to see if your Maven knowledge is up to the par, go and take them! And let me know your comments. If you register on the site you can even propose new questions!

Enjoy! (I hope...;-))

There were the usual suspects (Mike Cannon-Brookes, Rod Johnson, Cedric Beust, Gavin King, etc) but as it was happening close to France, it was cool to see that almost all my OSSGTP fellows were also there (Ludovic Dubost, Henry Story, Benjamin Mestrallet, Francois Le Droff, Didier Girard). In addition it was good to see Jerome Lacoste and Philippe Kernevez there.

I've had the pleasure of giving 2 sessions:

• Maven: A session explaining why you would use Maven and trying to show Maven from all its different angles. I hope I have been successful in sharing my enthousiasm for Maven. The room was packed (I'd say around 400 to 600 people). Before starting with my session I've asked how many people are already using Maven and I've counted about 20 (but at that time the room was only half-packed), so I'd say it was about 3-5%. My second was "How many are planning to use Maven" and I got a resounding 3/4th of the people raising their hand. That shows that Maven is still in it's early adoption phase and that it has some great potential.
• AOSD: Agile Offshore: The last day was for the business track presentations and I gave one which is my return of experience of 3 years of doing offshore development using an agile methodology.

It seems the tracks were all recorded and you should be able to see them live very soon (I'm really excited to see that for myself as I've missed a few sessions during the first days of the conference and looking at oneself in Video is a good way to improve one's presentation skills... ;-)).

See you next year at Javapolis 2005!

This time we had several newcomers: Henry Story, Patrick Chanezon and Luis Arias. Patrick did a presentation on Rome, his pet project and Henry tried to explain to us how to combine ATOM and FOAF and what ATOM/OWL was... Not a simple task is you're not versed in ontologies... ;-)

Here are Henry and Luis:

Here's Patrick:

And some of us trying to figure out what OWL, FOAF and ontologies are:

Then, as usual we went for dinner together and had a very nice evening disucssing a bit about everything...

A few other pictures are available here.

Next time we'll try some coding or review session as suggested on our Wiki. If you're in Paris, feel free to join us.

Here are the slides of my 2 presentations:

• Enterprise builds (description).
• Case study: Distributed Agile Development (description).

Update: All TSSS slides are available here (registered attendees only).