I just came back from Microsoft Technology Summit, that took place at Redmond, WA. This was an invitation-only event, and about 50 non-Microsoft developers from around the world came there to listen to Microsoft teams that develop software and tell them if its great or sucks.

Organization of this event was excellent. Even coffee was served from the real Starbucks-like machine. Actually, once the coffee lady apologized and said that I should wait for a couple of minutes while she re-powers the machine. At Microsoft, even coffee machine require reboot.

Im not going to give here detailed coverage of all presentations and discussions  just a quick overview. The most important thing that I learned (do not tell me that you knew it all along) is that THE most important MS goal is to sell more Windows licenses. They are ready to work with anyone (Sun, IBM, Novell&) as long as it helps selling more licenses. They clearly stated that people do not buy operational systems, they buy applications that runs under OS, hence if say people like some application of any third party, MS will be happy to work with them to make sure it runs under Vista.
They are pretty active in the open source for the same exact reason  selling OS licenses for people who will be using this open source software.

There is term Coopetition that means that they are ready to cooperate with any company and compete with it at the same time. They had good collaborations with JBoss, implemented PHP for .Net, invited top FireFox developers for a technical discussions, et al.

Most of the presenters were really smart software engineers with deep knowledge of their subject areas. But some of them suffering star syndrome assuming that just the fact that they appear in the room should make people happy.

Google was mentioned on several occasions  it bothers MS. These two companies make tons of money by using absolutely different business models (selling licenses vs. selling ads), but todays cool-factor is at the Googles side.

I never knew that Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition is free and is pretty powerful IDE comparable with Eclipse.
The most interesting sessions were on Internet Information Server 7, AJAX, Cardspace, and rich Internet applications with WPF and WPF/E. The fact that Microsoft is the only vendor of the tools and engines supporting these technologies makes things easier  they do not need to deal with lots of configuration issues that enterprise Java developers face on the daily basis.

I really liked their WPF and WPF/E offering for the rich Internet applications. WPF and WPF/E will seriously compete with Adobe Flex and Apollo leaving Java and AJAX way behind in the fields of Web and desktop application development. I am a Java developer and I am not affiliated neither with Adobe nor with Microsoft, which hopefully makes my assessment a bit more trustworthy.

Lots of bloggers were there, and Im sure youll be able to find a lot more information about this interesting event.