Spent a morning listening to the compelling reasons why we should use windows over linux. However MS did concede that if there was an audience for office on linux etc , they would port it. Economics prevent them from doing so. The fragement distributions they say would cause them a support nightmare. So nothing new on the argument front.

They are against GPL , their words not mine. I guess though most commercial software developers should be against GPL , or in the end all programs will be free and there will be no industry left. That may be a completely ignorant statement on my part, but thats my understanding of GPL.

The afternoon sessions were very very good, listened to how the Dot Net compiler builds IL , which was very interesting, and all about the new features in SQL Server 2005. No suprises there for me as we are already on the TAP , and delivery was fairly poor by kalen delaney , looks like she had been caught on the hop. Again thats my humble opinion, it must be hard to give talks on a product thats not released when the feature set is not static.

There was a very interesting session of Software management, the dangers of micro management, and the recognition that slippage is usually inevetable , i like the phrase "slippage is inevitable , because things that were not know are now known".

Rounded that off by reading a document on the differences between the Linux kernal and the Windows kernel...... pretty fair document sticking to the facts.

A good day. More tomorrow.