I got back Sunday morning after a red eye flight Saturday night. What an exhausting way of traveling after a very exhausting week! But, the week was definitely worth it in terms of information gained and shared, and contacts made and expanded.
My highlights were meeting some people for the first time as well as seeing people I know again. I finally met Jamie Cansdale (of TestDriven.NET fame), Tomas Restrepo (we have spoken through IM for so long -- it was finally good to meet in person), Roy Osherove, Casey Chestnut, Sahil Malik, and several others I know I will remember after I write this post ;). I also saw Mario Cardinal and Guy Barrette, friends I last saw at DevTeach. I especially liked seeing others within the Security Developer MVP category: Nicole Calinoiu (great catching up on security talks we had in Montreal), Valery Pryamikov (he was around for a short time, but I enjoyed our conversations immensely), Kenny Kerr, Anil John, Mauro Sant'Anna, Rudolph Araujo, Raffaele Rialdi, and Oleg Mihailik. From Microsoft, I spoke to or heard from Mike Downen, Shawn Farkas, Chris Lyon, and Surupa Biswas (all from the CLR and/or BCL teams), Michael Howard, JD Meier, and Avi Ben-Menahem (working on Vista security). I ended my last evening with dinner with my great friend Sam Gentile at an "authentic" Mexican restaurant near our hotel -- we talked about our respective week involving the CLR, architecture, and security, plus I finished a couple of margaritas to round out my time in Seattle!
Of course, I got lots of great information on security and other features with VS 2005 and beyond -- some of it I am still wrestling with in my head to know how things work now and will change in the future. One key concern within our security developer meetings with Microsoft is making sure security resources are understandable and available to the typical developer. That includes secure architecture, secure developement, and secure deployment. It can't be only a few who "get it" if we all want secure software.
