Last week Seattle hosted a Microsoft internal event called TechReady. Microsoft folks from all around the world, who interact with customers as part of their day job, joined us to discuss the company’s latest offerings. Simon Guest was responsible for the architecture track of the event. He did a fantastic job and the event feedback confirms that.

Simon invited me to talk about High-Performance Service-Oriented Computing based on an article Jim and I wrote for the MS architecture journal some time ago. If you were at PDC05, you should have received a copy of the magazine with our article.

Since Microsoft now has a product in the HPC space, I thought it would be a good idea to do the presentation together with Marvin Theimer (now an architect at the Windows Compute Cluster Server team). As Marvin and I were preparing the slides, it occurred to me that the presentation was forming to be something that was closer to what Marvin has been talking about rather than my stuff so I asked Marvin to do the presentation solo. It was very nice of him to accept. Marvin did a great job delivering our material. I haven’t seen the feedback yet so I don’t know whether what we prepared was too much for our audience. I do hope I’ll get another opportunity to talk at an architecture track because it looked like it was great fun to be there.

It was at TechReady I finally met John Bristowe in person. It was great hanging out with John. I really enjoyed it! Thanks for all the introductions! (John knows so many people in Microsoft, it’s amazing :-).

We also checked out the Microsoft gaming room with many xbox 360s in action on HD TVs. Wow!!! I want one! (but I still can’t find any local or internet store selling them).

I also met Arvindra Sehmi in person. We had a fascinating discussion. I am looking forward to working with him and his team. Expect some great stuff here.