Mr. Eric Rudder live!

Eric Rudder - the VP of Development & Platform group from Microsoft is here in Sofia right now. I was lucky one to be able to participate in a live meeting with him in the office of Microsoft Bulgaria. We had a very open conversation and discussion over what's been around and what's hot in Microsoft world. We touched base on WCF, because one of its PM leads were there two - I was very nicely surprised to know that he is Bulgarian - I am so proud, because the guy really looked very knowledge :-). To me this was very interesting conversation, because as I already told you my master thesis was about distributed transactions and more specifically WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-Coordination, which are supported by WCF. I shoot couple of questions at the PM live and we decided to continue our conversation off-topic with the details I was particularly interested. I wanted to know more about the types of distributed transactions WCF supports. The theory defined many different types, but among them the most important ones are the flat and nested/hierachical transactions. Another one was about WS-BusinessActivity. It is interesting to know whether this specification will be implemented as part of WCF or will be in WF. I was told that WS-BA is not of topmost priority right now, because they are putting more effort into making WCF and WF collaborate together. Will see!
Eric Rudder is for sure a very versatile person. I personally like the fact that he has developer background but he also has very strong business feeling for sure. It was really great to see how passionate he is about software and technology! Obviously he has a very versatile knowledge and look in software industry. For example, we talked about SAP technology and how it compares to Microsoft technology stack. I actually pose him the question - "How would you convince me to use Microsoft technologies instead of SAP?". This was a tricky one :) . But he managed to explain us the pros and cons of both solutions and how Microsoft think can position itself thru the verticals as opposed to SAP. It is well-known that SAP has relatively high pricing especially for SMBs, where Microsoft is mainly targeted. However, I believe that with WF, WCF and the whole SOA paradigm in hands, Microsoft may provide to its clients very customizable and highly scalable business solutions based on Microsoft servers like BizTalk, SharePoint, SQL Server, etc. I believe that Microsoft .NET 3.0 could bring all that and thus be a potential rival to SAP.