CrapsI apologize for writing up a roundup for the Mix06 conference several days too late, but I was not in a good condition to blog during the conference. In part it was due to a cold I was fighting which left me unmotivated to blog. You might think that the lack of sleep and drinking would have contributed, but the strange thing about Vegas is that the less I slept, and the more I drank, the better I felt.

When you are having interesting conversations with folks, you start to lose track of just how many beers you’ve downed.

Web Standards For Real

In any case, I was impressed with the conference less due to any particular session (though there were some good ones), but more due to the reflection on what appears to be true change happening in Microsoft.

One session in particular, the IE7 Future panel, struck me with who Microsoft invited to attend. They had Molly Holzschlag, the group lead for the Web Standards Project, Eric Meyer, noted CSS guru up on stage. I sat next to David Shea, creator of CSS Zen Garden.

These are not your typical Microsoft conference attendees and perhaps have been some of the harshest critics of IE6. In part, this shows the confidence that the IE7 team has in what they are trying to accomplish. Several of these leading experts walked away from the conference with a better feelings about what Microsoft is doing in this space.

Fellow Bloggers

Deck of Cards Of course the best part of the conference is meeting my fellow bloggers. Almost immediately Jon and I ran into Jeff Atwood who is quite funny in person.

I also ran into the dynamic duo, Adam Kinney and Erik Porter. I met these guys at Tech-Ed 2004 in San Diego when they both worked at the same company in Indiana.

Also met up with Andrew Stopford who is a class act. We talked a bit about MbUnit and wondered how do we get the word out about MbUnit. NUnit has a much larger penetration simply because it was first (which is a big deal I suppose) and because of its name. It falls under the so called “N-Series” of open source tools.

MbUnit, in my humble opinion, is much superior and definitely worth trying out. I may try and prepare a talk to give at my local users group on it someday.

Also hung out at the tables with Steve Maine and Clemens Vasters. Steve and I had a great run at the craps table only to lose much of it at the BlackJack table. Meanwhile, Clemens taught us an interesting travel game that involves people watching at hotel bars. I won’t divulge the details nor the name of the game, but just know it was quite interesting.

I’m sure I am missing someone, but it doesn’t matter. I had a great time and am looking forward to Mix07 in whatever incarnation it may appear.