I was invited by Microsoft to attend the Connect 2006 event, which was held this year in Nice, France. What a great place to connect!

The main focus during event was on connecting with the community. Lot’s of interesting people (most of them, if not all, where community leaders) around. It was buzzing! It was great to sit down and talk to people who do something for the developers using Microsoft technology, to learn from them, to share your experiences. Microsoft recognizes the value of the community (that’s not unique of course, but it really shows they realize that communities create important value to their business).

Security is hot! That’s something that was clearly communicated. We had a very good session, hosted by Rafal Lukawiecki of Project Botticelli Ltd., about “Process Based, Holistic Security”. The session basically was about approaching security issues from a non-technical point of view. He strongly believes that technology cannot solve the security challenges anymore and that a broader approach is needed. I cannot agree more.

A second session went into how Vista tackles ‘unsecure/legacy’ applications. Simply said: a lot of software out there has been written using hardcoded references to C:\Program Files. And a lot of software writes to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry branch. Both no-go’s. So what Vista does is that it creates a ‘virtual’ store where that application writes its data. The application still ‘thinks’ it is writing to C:\Program Files, however, in reality it is writing to a folder which has been created in the user’s data folder. Same goes for the registry, it will create a branch in HKEY_CURRENT_USER in which the data ends up that the application tried to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. All I can say: smart.

It was also very interesting to see that many the content owners for TechEd 2006, to be held in Barcelona in November of this year where available. This enabled us to approach them with topic ideas, questions, etc. etc. It was good talking to you, David and Hans!

I was interviewed by David McMahon from the UK about my views on .NET/J2EE, C#/Java etc. given my background in IBM related technology. That background helps me a lot putting things in perspective. I know that interoperability between those ‘competing’ technologies is going to be my topic in the future. ‘We’ from the IBM world cannot ignore the fact that many customers are also deploying IIS/ASP.NET environments. It’s out there, and we have to connect to it. To me that’s a good thing. Why not use it for own benefit? Learn about it, and use it to the full extend. Remember, it’s not religion, it’s only good technology.