It's been a very interesting couple of weeks...

I attended the local .Net User's Group "Education Day" event covering the Model-View-ViewModel architecture pattern, presented by Microsoft's WPF Program Manager, Karl Shifflet, and Jamie Rodriguez .  Karl missed our breakfast meeting, but we arranged to talk on the phone, and he apparently thought enough of my e-mail summarizing some of the issues to forward it to HIS boss.  Microsoft dev. evangelist Bruno Terkaly has also forwarded some of my feedback on various topics, and we joked that I'd end up on some kind of internal list of "trouble makers" at Microsoft (I listen for the black helicoptors at night...).

My e-mail included the following: "Looking at forums and sites like StackOverflow.com and listening to questions at the end of presentations, you'll keep hearing confused developers asking "Do I need to learn Blend?"  "For data access, are we supposed to use ADO.Net, or DAAB, or Linq to SQL (and is that now deprecated), or Entity Framework (and what about the posted 'vote of no-confidence')...?"  "Are we supposed to REJECT the WPF architecture encouraged by VStudio in order to insert some MVPoo mini-framework?"  "Should we use MVPoo version A, B, C, or go with Prism?" etc. etc. etc.   Microsoft reps seem to treat these as trivial concerns because they are each focused on their own specific area of technology, not considering that a dev. team on an actual project is in the position of having to essentially investigate ALL the available options in order to pick the best approach for EACH area of technology (because their project involves data access, AND remote comms, AND a UI...), and they have to do this in the limited time available before a project is under active development, and they have to train all the members of the dev. team (who are generally NOT MVP caliber developers)."

The gist of our conversation was that Microsoft is aware of many of these issues, and has been discussing them internally.  Karl was also surprised to hear that Blend is NOT included in the professional-level MSDN subscription, and said he'd recommend changing that, which would be great.

I attended the first meeting of a local SilverLight User's group, hosted in Microsoft's San Francisco offices.  This was the first event I've ever been to, where the number of designers and design-related discussion had any kind of parity with development concerns.  Presenters included Scott Stanfield and other representatives from Vertigo, as well as design/devs from the San Franciso offices of the advertising firm, McCann Worldgroup.

I also attended the day-long MSDN Developer's Conference, billed as a "mini-PDC", covering updates to topics and technologies presented last September, and was honored/priviledged to be invited to attend not one, but two social gatherings, where I got to hobnob with Microsoft and local dev. community leaders, bending their ears on dev.-related issues -- especially after the first couple of free pints...  I reluctantly passed up a free pass to MIX, since I just can't justify the hotel and other costs at this time (and videos for the sessions will be available online anyway).

For the second time in as many months, I've gotten e-mail from someone who noticed my CodeProject posts, asking if I'd be interested in doing some WPF consulting.  This time the request came directly from the CEO of an east coast medical equipment manufacturer, and I've forwarded some WPF resource links that should help their devs get up to speed, and offered to put together a simple demo to illustrate some architecture and design options just for fun -- since many of the requirements don't seem all that different from another CodeProject demo I've been working on anyway.

My social calendar hasn't been this busy since college!  Even the ILLUSION of being included in serious dev. discussions has me hooked, as I discovered from monitoring, the "WPF Disciples" discussion thread.  You have to filter out alot of empty "banter", but I swear I learn something completely unexpected from that site at least once a week (variations on approaches to M-V-VM, markup extensions as a localization technique etc.), and it really makes you feel like you're sitting directly together with the people who will have the most influence in guiding the direction of the WPF platform.