Microsoft Tech Ed 2010 | The Gadget Grill

Every year, Microsoft Australia hosts a major technical event for developers and IT professionals, known as Tech Ed. For the major part of the last week, I was fortunate to be able to have attended this year’s event as a guest of Microsoft.

Although my attendance was as a member and guest of Microsoft’s Open Source Convergence group, this conference offers attendees a wonderful opportunity to achieve many goals. For instance, upcoming technologies, such as Windows Phone 7 and X-Box were on display and able to be seen by many. Those wishing to pursue formal professional certifications through the MSCE processes were encouraged to complete courses and examinations and thus improve their personal professional standings.

All were encouraged to attend as many of the 150 or so sessions being held at the Gold Coast Convention Centre during the conference, so as to increase and improve their knowledge of the technologies that are currently in common use throughout the general business world.

But as I mentioned earlier, I was there as a member of the Open Source/Convergence stream; given that we are talking about Microsoft, how does Open Source come into the picture?

What many are unaware of is the amount of effort that Microsoft is now putting into the development and integration within their core product lines of many of the traditional Open Source technologies.

PHP, perl, MySql, and Ruby on Rails, for instance, are all popular Open Source technologies, and as such, are technologies that we tend to think of in terms of Linux. While the very term “LAMP stack” refers specifically to MySql and PHP. for instance, Microsoft have been looking at these technologies, and writing and contributing back to the Open Source communities thousands of lines of source code, so that these technologies may be run, side by side, with Microsoft products, in a Windows environment, as native binaries.

Yes, that’s right: perl and PHP, directly accessing MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQL Server, from within your Windows 7 desktop environment!

And as a part of tech Ed 2010, Microsoft was able to bring together a number of Australia’s leading Open Source developers, and had them meet with some of their own Open Source technologists.

Presentations were made that demonstrated and explained the efforts that Microsoft were making in this realm, and presentations from the community were made to demonstrate and explain to Microsoft some of the efforts and directions that the community were taking.

Microsoft brought to the table a number of their internal staff, including Tom Hanrahan and Eric Golpe, who are both senior technical staff within Microsoft. These guys very quickly demonstrated that they had a “hands-on” approach, with a very open attitude. They were clearly on hand to listen and become engaged with those at the coalface within the community, and their positive attitude and willingness to actively listen, discuss, offer suggestions and communicate with those present illustrates, to me, a level of engagement, professionalism and dedication that one rarely sees from an organisation of this type.

Microsoft are an organisation that we all love to criticise, and it’s important that, when kudos are due, we recognise and applaud the efforts being made. The consensus that I took away at the end of the week was that the locals involved in these efforts – and that extends to those in Singapore as well – are to be applauded and encouraged for their efforts and attitude, and that there needs to be even greater inclusion of Open Source technologies within future Tech Ed and similar events.