I arrived in Seattle today to get warmed up for the ALT.NET Seattle conference this weekend. I came up a couple of days early to meet with a few people before the event started on Friday.
Once we landed, our first trip was to the Pike Place Market, which is right on the shore of the Peugeot Sound. We had lunch at a great chowder house, followed by a coffee at the original Starbucks coffee shop. After the food and drink stop, we walked around the market and stopped at an REI outfitters (like a Bass Pro without all the hunting gear) since Dru forgot his jacket in Kansas. As we left the store, the sun came out and it was really too warm for a jacket -- such is luck. So we got back in the car and drove to a mini-mart to get some Monster to fuel the next few days, after which we parked downtown and walked to the Westin to meet up with some guys.
When we got to the Westin, we met up with Nick Parker to talk about various open source .NET projects that are active. After a while, Greg Young joined us and shared his understanding of how messaging applications should work and gave us some tips from his experiences using various forms of message transportation. The discussions started off general and got more specific as we talked about particular scenarios within our applications.
Since Dru Sellers and I both work on MassTransit and both use it in our commercial applications, it was very helpful to get feedback on this key infrastructure component. What we found is that while we have a pretty solid start, there are a few clarifying points that will help elevate the platform to be even less complex while adding new functionality. We came away with a lot of good ideas (and some diagrams, which David Laribee never actually witnessed being drawn) that we will probably explore over the next day or two.
After a few beers and some good discussion, the MVPs kicked over to the evening party that MS had arranged, so Dru and I went to dinner and drove out to the hotel.
Tomorrow should be an interesting day as we try to lay down some of the things we talked about tonight into code. We also have a very exciting dinner planned for tomorrow night, but I'll save that for another post later in the week.