I'm not at PDC, I stayed home. We've got some exciting stuff going on at Corillian and I've also got to speak at our user's conference next week, so PDC wasn't well timed for me. However, there are a number of Corillian folks wandering around down there.
Stuart Celarier is an engineer here at Corillian who is also, in his spare time, a liaison for INETA in charge of the setup of the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at PDC. (Here's an interview with Stuart at Channel9). That said, it's important to note that while Stuart administers the BoF tracks and manages the speakers, it is ultimately Microsoft's PDC and Microsoft's space to offer to INETA. It was Stuart's job to collect submissions but Microsoft's ultimate decision to accept or reject sessions.
Miguel de Icaza posted on his blog last week how frustrated he was (rightfully so) with the way his Mono BoF was handled. However, there is a lot of bureaucracy underneath INETA and Stuart that is totally out of his control. Microsoft's position is likely that Mono isn't their product and it's neither supported nor endorsed by Microsoft. Obviously, there's a lot of strong opinions about Mono.
Both Stuart and I have spoken to Miguel about this and we're cool. Yes, it's lame the way it was handled by the Powers That Be. However, I wanted to say publically that we at Corillian very much like what Mono is doing and continue to explore it with interest. Additionally, I personally totally dig what Mono is doing. DasBlog 1.6 has been "adjusted" to run on Mono (and ships with the Mono Live CD) and it's on my list of things to do to get DasBlog 1.8 running on Mono.
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