End of Day 1
This has been an interesting day. Most of it was spent in meetings but one post meeting discussion was particularly cool. Eric Anderson is an engineering manager and a passionate proponent of eXtreme Programming. Novell is using XP extensively and Eric attributes some of their improved productivity and reduced release schedules to XP.
We also discussed the topic of Rapid Application Development and got into the Microsoft vs Open Source. He's used Visual Studio and Monodevelop and said that the gap is quickly closing. I've yet to try out the tools on a Linux box so I'll withhold judgement until I can play with it myself.
We also discussed Longhorn, WinFS, and Indigo vs their Open Source equivalents. I don't think I was aware of some of the things that have a direct equivalent. With Novell announcing today that their iFolder product is going Open Source they have basically contributed a contender for the WinFS piece to the Linux community. I need to study up on this more but the project is called Simias and will be available shortly from the Novell Forge site.
Tomorrow I get to go to sessions and have an appointment with the Mono team. Should be interesting!
