Greets from Redmond, Washington!  It's a far, far journey for this Hawaii boy to be attending the Lang.Net Symposium this year.  I am armed with the Camcorder and am taping all of these presentations for my personal archives.  Well, they might be published online -- If the recordings come out OK.  (Keep in mind, I'm an amateur Videographer).  Since the videos are taped in WideScreen (16:9) ratio, the videos might be published via Silverlight.  We'll see.  Ping me about the videos if you really want a copy.

Geez, with all of these computer language designers and developers in-house, I felt like I should have started the day with the obligatory lightbulb joke:

 "How many <computer language> developers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

But anyways, I digress.  I'm just happy to be sharing the room and collecting some knowledge from some of the "Superstars" in this space, like Charles Nutter (JRuby), Miguel de Icaza (Mono), and John Lam (IronRuby).  Seriously, I'm just ecstatic -- it's taken ALL of my energy and composure to NOT act like a crazed schoolgirl when <Favorite Movie Star> enters the room. 

The presentations from "Day 1" of the Symposium were tremendously educational and insightful.  Jim Hugunin's presentation on the Vision of the DLR was an eye-opener for me, and completely blew me away when I saw IronPython's performance benchmarks.  Now, IronPython itself is already an accomplishment for proving the CLR's^[1] capability as a Dynamic Language host.  But to demonstrate that the CLR implementation outperforms the original C-Python (due to JIT optimizations versus interpretation), and then to further demonstrate that the DLR^[2]yields even more performance gains, well, that's just awesome.  Since IronRuby also targets the DLR, I'm very eager to watch it mature as IronPython has. 

These are exciting times for Ruby developers, indeed.  I'd love to see a 100% speed boost in my Rails Apps, simply by redeploying on JRuby/GlassFish or IronRuby/IIS.

I'll write more about my Lang.NET experiences, and describe my "broad vision" plans for Ruby and Python soon.

¹CLR - the Common Language Runtime - ie. ".NET" on Windows platforms, or Mono everywhere else.

²DLR - Dynamic Language Runtime - a core extension library to the CLR intended to better support Dynamic Language implementations.

After several months of diverting my free time to studying for Microsoft's Certification Exams, I'm pleased to tell the world that I'm now a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer - specifically, I'm certified as an MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer .

It was a brutal exercise that took almost a year for me to accomplish.

I took the Self-Paced Study approach for the 5 exams required, as I'm usually more effective going through books.  The books I used will also serve as a bookshelf reference, in case I ever need to refresh my mind on something.

About the only thing I didn't care for, throughout this exercise, was to force myself to reframe my thinking process to accept (or at least understand the reasoning behind) "The Microsoft Way" of doing things.  The "Enterprise Professional" Exam was the last one on my task list, and it was particularly difficult for me to choke that content down.  I had to bite my tongue and answer Exam Questions "The Microsoft Way", instead of "The Lalee Way".  No points for style or elegance in thinking -- it's all multiple choice answers.  <more>