Mono Meeting at the Microsoft PDC

Update: We had a hugely successful meeting during the PDC. I will post details after I decompress from a great week at the event.

Mono users meeting at the Microsoft PDC.

Date: Tuesday September 13th.

Location: Sheraton Downtown LA hotel, a short walk (map) from the Staples Conventions Center.

Room: Santa Monica Room.

Time:The meeting will start at 6pm and will go until 9:30pm.

Open to the public

Pass the word to other fellow .NET developers.

At the meeting we will talk about the Mono Project's current state, milestones, new developments, platform support and upcoming releases. Various Mono developers will be there to answer your questions both members of the community and Novell employees working on Mono.

The evening surprise is the unveiling of the new Mono T-Shirts design by Finnish artist Tuomas Kuosmanen. We will be giving out t-shirts to the attendees.

We will showcase some of the Mono-based applications we have built for Linux:

• iFolder file sharing and synchronization,
• the Banshee media player,
• our new photo management software,
• the desktop search,
• the MonoDevelop IDE and
• the GTK# GUI toolkit which is the API we use to create all of these applications.

We will also showcase the new vector-based rendering APIs available for developers (completely cross-platform) as well as the new OpenGL-based windowing system.

We will answer your questions on how to bring your .NET applications to Linux, MacOS X and Solaris and how to take advantage of the Mono and Linux-specific APIs.

Finally, we will demo some of the the new Mono software funded by Google's Summer of Code:

• XBuild: the open source msbuild implementation for assisting you in rebuilding your new projects on Mono.
• Ruby.NET and PHP.NET compilers.
• The DIVA Movie editor.
• The new ASP.NET editor.
• The .NET bug finder.
• The Cecil libraries for reading and writing CIL images.
• Mono's XAML compiler.

Background for the Mono Meeting

Background: As some of you know, Microsoft for the second time in a row blocked the Mono Birds-of-a-feathers (BOF) meeting from being held at their Professional Developers Conference. It is their conference, and I understand that a cross-platform .NET implementation might make them nervous (we are creating lots of new applications with it, and we are helping people reuse their existing skills on Linux).

It is their conference, and they have every right to control what they will allow to be shown there, but they actively have misrepresented things. On the PDC web site they claim that the BOF selection is up to INETA ( apparently an independent non-profit organization). Here is what the BOF selection process was advertised (you must have an MS Passport to read this):

The Birds of a Feather sessions at the Microsoft PDC05 are chaired by INETA (International .NET Association), the premier .NET developer user group associations.

[..]

Final selection and scheduling of the sessions will be performed by INETA based on popularity: all decisions are final. Submitters will be notified by Friday September 2, 2005 whether their session was accepted or declined.

What they failed to mention is that the Mono BOF was never listed for voting, and hence it never received a single vote. My submission was confirmed as I exchanged two emails with Stuart Celarier at Corillian, but the BOF was never listed and further emails to Stuart went unanswered, he wrote on INETA'S web site:

INETA is chairing the Birds of a Feather track at PDC 2005. This community-driven activity brings together conference attendees for open, moderated discussions on topics of shared professional or community interest.
[..]

Birds of a Feather really do flock together!

Stuart probably did not get the memo.

My guess is that it is best not to list the BOF than have to answer obnoxious questions about why the top-voted BOF had not been accepted (this year they also removed vote count display from the BOF listing).

So much for the independent INETA chairing the BOF process. On Friday, I was notified that my BOF proposal was not accepted.

I believe this is at the core on what is wrong in the way that Microsoft treats its users and developers and why people consider alternatives in the first place.

BOF sessions in every conference I have attended in the past ten years is usually an event that happens after hours and is organized by the attendees in an organic way: a white board is left open for groups to allocate an hour or two for what they consider an interesting topic. Conference organizers never have any editorial control over them, they basically give out the rooms for the various communities to get together.

At Stephen Walli's urging we put together Mono meeting on a nearby hotel and Tuomas designed a beautiful new T-Shirt (Thanks!). It will be fun, and I will probably wear my large foam red cowboy hat.

Anyways, its important to separate the great and amazing developers, testers and architects working on .NET from the marketing and management people. I look forward to a great time at the PDC. See you there!

Stickers

We want to distribute some cute stickers, an idea courtesy of Mike Shaver's: something like this:

"[Logo] using Mono;"

Picture this with me: Black background, yellow letters, nice cute Mono logo outline. I think it will look lovely.

Small stickers to put on badges and medium size for laptops. If you know someone in LA or Boston that can get this done quickly and before the PDC, let me know