Off to visit the Beast of Redmond ;-)

Mahesh Prakriya at Microsoft was kind enough to suggest that I give a talk at the Lang.NET symposium, and so tomorrow I'm flying to Seattle. It looks like a fantastically interesting meetup, and I'm really looking forward to it.

The one hiccup for me was trying to work out what to put in the talk. Having been on so many client and potential client visits, and done marketing material for non-technical users, it was very hard to switch over to thinking again about what Mahesh had clearly realised, and Jon Udell touched on back when he did a screencast with us: that a lot of the power behind Resolver One comes from the way it treats spreadsheets as just another .NET language.

This doesn't mean that our marketing and sales efforts are wrong -- our users and users-to-be don't really care about how the program does what it does, they care about what problems it solves for them. But it's useful reminder to me that I need to keep both sides in mind.

[Update] The talk went well! It was videoed and I'll link to it as soon as they put it online. In the meantime, here are the slides.

[Update, later] Darryl Taft has written about the talk in eWeek.