It isn’t often that I get to spend several days listening to the people that are creating the software products at Microsoft. In the past, when I have been to Redmond it was usually on a press junket with colleagues from mainstream IT and business media, listening to spin doctors and marcom folks who were trying to get “coverage”. This week I am in the company of people who write code, and have a deep knowledge of the tools, software, and applications, as part of the company’s Technology Summit.

It is an interesting mix of both attendees and speakers. They come from all corners of the world, and from various parts of our industry: corporate IT development group managers who have dozens of coders working for them, consultants that also develop their own applications, academics who run compsci departments, and so forth.

To give you an idea, I am posting links to many of their blogs, many of whom are so multi-tasking that they are coding while they are listening (or half-listening) to the presentations, and posting to their blogs in near real-time. So we have this new phenomenon, where everyone is typing at their tabletops. The speakers are also posting to their own blogs too and reading the attendee blog postings. The ones who have yet to give their speech can thereby self-correct their presentations, or refute what the audience has posted. It is so introspective and self-absorbed, all part of the new world of social media.

(Click here for a podcast commentary on MTS.)

Attendees

Travis' blog: http://www.travisswicegood.com/

Dianne's blog: http://www.srtsolutions.com/public/blog/60881

Michael Wise http://blogs.omnieffect.com

Bryan Hansen http://ldsarchitect.org/    

Scott Preston http://codegin.com/blog/

Ben Galbraith http://galbraiths.org/blog

Dion  Almaer http://www.almaer.com/blog/

Channy Yun, Korea Crunch http://koreacrunch.com

Microsoft presentor blogs

Michael Howard, security http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard

Sam Ramji, open source labs

Don Box http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/

John Lam http://www.iunknown.com

Joe Stagner http://www.joeon.net 

Bill Staples (IIS) http://blogs.iis.net/bills/default.aspx