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Arriving At Mix 2008 (Las Vegas)

Technically its 4am EST, but here its 1am (and I pretty much live on a west coast clock, even though I was born and raised in Va), which is prime nocturnal developer time to get something productive done without interruption. So Im sitting at the Starbucks at the Egyptian style Luxor hotel here at the 24 hour Starbucks (take notes Charlottesville, we need more 24 hour places for geeky people like me. Even Richmond had a 24 hour gym that was like almost a quarter of the price of the local gyms that close at 9 PM in Charlottesville), hearing the rambling of someone to spout something that resembles a cheesy pick up line and echoing of random strangers walking by.

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Mix 2008

But lets face it, the real reason Im here is to find out all about the new and upcoming technologies that will hopefully make life easier not just for the developer, but you; the reader, the end user, the client, the father, the single mother, the person in the daily trenches that keeps things running smooth.

Unfortunately, new technology does not always lead to make your life easier, in fact it often makes you dependent or duplicate processes that should other wise should be done once. Or maybe you are in that organization that hacks together things so youre ending up duplicating data in multiples places, chained to your cell phone that was supposed to bring you freedom, and using the latest and greatest software that is seriously lacking in features.

However, the developers at osc (opensource connections)  strive to use technology for the benefit of our clients and end users, and find ways of using new technologies to fill in the gaps that old technologies or bad design often leaves behind.

Tomorrow Microsoft is supposed to unveil the uber secret workings of IE 8 (Internet Explorer 8), have a keynote that includes Ray Ozzie (the guy replacing bill gates at Microsoft), Scott Gutherie, and Dean Hachmovicth.

The other highlight of tomorrow will be seeing how MySpace used .Net 3.5 and WCF (windows communication foundation) to create a massive RESTful API that obviously supports millions of hits per day.

Myspace Note: For those of you that do not know, despite the fact that many of the urls on myspace still say .cfm, that site is in fact run on IIS and asp.net and the changes of late have reflected the new technologies like ASP.NET Ajax being used throughout the site.

For those of you interested in how .Net technologies and opensource technologies blend better than the typical person might expect, you can always e-mail me at mherndon@opensourceconnections.com to see what is really out there and happening.  For those of you that are totally in the dark in the last 2 years or so Microsoft has really been making an effort to work with the opensource community and has seen the power in it. Hence web sites like Port 25 and codeplex, not to mention the invention of the Microsoft permissive license.