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I feel as though I could write forever about my trip to the Microsoft campus and, as I sit here by the water fountain next to the cafeteria (by building 5) I kind of hope that some of this experience stays with me forever.  It's not just the great people that I've met on this trip but the very place (campus) itself that leaves you with the belief that anything is possible.

Just in case I hadn't mentioned it previously ;-)... I'm in Redmond this week getting a look at some new ASP.NET bits.  In a nutshell, the stuff that I've seen has not only blown me away but will likely answer most of the issues being faced when building current, real world apps today.  Over the 2 days that we've been here the MS guys'n'gals have been demonstrating and explaining the bits to us and, I can safely say that they are just as excited by this stuff as we are.

Tonight we went to dinner and I managed to sit next to one of the guys on the Data team.  That is the team that are working with the Yukon guys to ensure things work nicely.  It was great to hear parts of the Yukon story first hand given that there's been so much hype and (mis-)information about it.  In short, even though I think that Yukon *could* totally change your life, I really think that - in the majority of cases - the database will be used in pretty much exactly the same manner as it is today.  In fact, I'll bet that , if you see a lot of CLR code showing up in your database, you're probably working too hard.  But, it will sure be interesting to see what happens there.

This week I'm spending time at Microsoft campus getting a heads-up on the future direction of ASP.NET.  This is exciting to me for so many reasons, and I've long envisaged coming here for myself to see:- The Microsoft Machine!

A couple of quickies...

My how time flies when you're blogging... 100 posts already :-)  If 1 human year == 7 Internet years (or whatever the equation is), I'm guessing that 1 Internet year ~= 7 Blogging years :-)

Recently, I've started using ExplicitCapture a lot more in my patterns.  Explicit capture can be turned on via its RegexOptions.ExplicitCapture option or via the (?mode-mode) inline mode modifier - "m".  One of the benefits of doing this is that "raw" parenthesis are not captured!

Started messing around with conditional matching today and was rather proud of myself when I got this stuff to work.