Meet the Experts last night was a chance to meet with the key Microsoft people over dinner in the dining hall (hanger?).  A seating plan showed where each team was located and it was just a matter of approaching the Microsoft employees in the blue or the black shirts.  Some of the teams look as apprehensive as teachers at a parent-teach night, but by the end of event everyone seemed to be getting down and talking.

I saw Chris Sells pull his laptop out and start coding with someone on the Windows Form table.  Anders was talking to a bunch of people about C# and all just about all of the Indigo team was there.  I could name drop and say that I enjoyed talking with Ingo, Don, Omri and others, but I wont as that would be showing off.  I got to meet Brent Rector who autographed my copy of his book (the first time I've ever had a book signed!).

It was such a lot of fun.  Once I'd exhausted all of the questions I could think of I sat down to eat (I needed real food after missing lunch and trying to get by on sugar in many different forms).  At that point I noticed a big whiteboard sign: Longhorn Shell Team.  No one was talking to the guys so I went up and said 'are you going to make the shell a first-class citizen in Windows so that my Java friends will stop buying the Mac for its Unix shell'.  Happily the answer was yes.  This is great as it's been a long time problem with Windows that it doesn't have a decent shell architecture.  Adam Barr wrote about this in his book 'Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters'.  The shell guys were really pumped and visibly passionate about what they are up to (creating a new scripting language, manipulating the system through objects with properties rather than text).