Next week I will at Microsoft's TechEd Australia event, courtesy of Microsoft Australia and Microsoft Open Source Labs.
More specifically, I'll be attending the Open Source mini-conf and discussion day on Tuesday, and presenting in the Community Presentations to Microsoft session on the current state of Perl and Windows on Wednesday.
Likely topics will include a review of the first year of the CPAN Testing Lab and a second-generation based on their Cloud Services, free code signing certificates for open source developers, and what issues are slowing us down or blocking progress.
So consider this your opportunity to raise any outstanding issues you have with Microsoft and Perl. What problems are you still seeing, what would like fixed or changed, and what is on your want-to-have list?
I'll try to address as many of your issues as possible in the time I have available with them (which is actually pretty substantial).
Do they have an API to get a list of Points of Interest around a set of coordinates?
Re:Porting Rakudo to .NET
Alias on 2010-08-20T14:35:27
It's been my experience that Microsoft doesn't necessarily work that way, except in a limited fashion.
What they are both interested and capable the most in is in the area of "Interop" as they call it. Contained, concrete steps they can take to remove roadblock from the path of otherwise active technologies, and to make them work better on Windows.
Some of these are financial, like the CPAN Testing Lab and their (rumored) free code signing certs. Some are toolchain related like CoApp.
The issues where they are the only ones that can fix a problem are the ones they are the most interested in. I can bring it up, but I suspect you won't see much interest.
Re:Better IIS support!
ddick on 2010-08-21T06:07:56
I agree with this.
Is the "CPAN Testing Lab" that virtual machine/VNC thing you mentioned some time ago for authors to use to test their code using? I tried using it, but found it to be impossible, because for something to be a viable debugging environment you need more than just perl. You need a usable editor (which Notepad ain't); you need tools like grep etc; you need to be able to easily find stuff. Now, maybe all of those things do exist and I was just looking in the wrong places, but if MS are going to take interoperability seriously, then they need to look hard at the human factors. They can't expect people who don't know Windows very well (but do know other OSes) to get much out of what I understand was an "out of the box" Windows installation.
It's also rather annoying to have to use a heavyweight GUI client to talk to the machines. I don't need to see the entire Windows desktop merely to test and debug my perl code. In fact, I don't *want* to see the whole Windows desktop, as it takes up valuable screen space that is better dedicated to a web browser so I can google for what all the cryptic error messages mean or for things like how to find a file on Windows. Being able to see both at the same time is far more productive than having to flip back and forth between windows that cover each other. They need a terminal interface that I can cut n paste to/from.
