Alan Griver is the Group Manager of the Visual Studio Data Group at Microsoft. Next week he moves from his Group Manager role to an Architect position at Microsoft. Alan, along with
Beth Massi, enjoyed
Julie Lerman's fun company from Vermont, to DevTeach in Montreal and back again for a VTDotNet Meeting.
Alan Griver is one of those presenters that it doesn't matter what he's going to talk about. You just show up. Very, very impressive guy. He spoke to us about LiNQ, or Language-Integrated Query. It was my first exposure to LiNQ, and I don't feel too bad about it being only my first taste since LiNQ won't be real-world until Orcas. Alpha CTPs are currently available, but as I've said before,
"I don't do CTPs. I do Beta 2's!" (Kind of a take-off on Eddie Murphy in the opening scene of Beverly Hills Cop, don't ya think? Axel Foley says from the back of the tractor trailer to the bad guys,
"I don't smoke Lucky Strikes man, I smoke King-Sized Kents!")One of Alan's early slides seemed radically different from almost every other slide I've ever seen, yet it wasn't radical at all. It had a picture of representatives from several Microsoft Teams who were involved in the creation of LiNQ, then Alan spoke a bit about each individual. Wow, PowerPoints with real people in them, real Microsoft people, working together to build something great. Ya know, a common question that goes through my head these days (and not just me) is how to fix our beloved, broken Microsoft. But when you see guys like the ones on that slide you're reminded of the incredible people who comprise Microsoft.
Two sidebars: 1) Microsoft is still broken, and 2) if they don't snatch up Jason Haley now that he's in Seattle they're not as smart as I thought they were.Oh, about LiNQ. Hubba-hubba! Simply dazzling technology. While Alan was demoing it I was thinking, "you mean it doesn't already work that way?" It seemed so intuitive and obvious that this is how you were always supposed to interact with data.
The other thought I had about LiNQ was when Alan demonstrated working with XML. He simply defined an XMLLinq datatype by typing
DIM MyXML as
<items>
<item>
<someElement>Something</someElement>
</item>
<items>Then he started to directly work with it! And with full intellisense. Yet as beautiful as that may be, apparently it is not a desired capability for the C-Sharp version of the product. Sorry, guys, you're going to have to explain that to me. Why the heck not????
Another great VTDotNet thanks to Julie Lerman, with a very special thanks to Alan Griver for taking the time to visit us while on the East Coast.