Patrick Cooney's Weblog

2004-01-27

I spent this afternoon with Chris Anderson (Avalon) and Don Box (Indigo) at a round-table for MVPs and a couple of hard to classify hangers-on (which captures me). The big take home for me was Don's line "Come for Avalon, stay for Indigo", which is to say I didn't get much out of it.

The discussion tended to bog down on topics like "Who will buy longhorn?" and "Is anyone willing to pay for software nowadays?". These big, vague and obvious questions really glaze my eyes over, so I spent a lot of the time staring at Don's boat shoes and wondering why he wasn't wearing socks.

I managed to provoke the great man himself when I asked why Visual Studio's asmx development is type-first (vs. schema-first), given the potential for later versioning pain, developer misunderstanding etc.

Don's response was something like: I don't know you, but I'm willing to bet you don't understand schema very well, so you are better off leaving it to us. So my tenuous claim to fame is that a famous developer doesn't know me, but just from looking at me, he doesn't think I'm very smart. A red letter day.

Back to weblog