Another trip to Germany, this time for Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET launch event, in Karlsruhe. I gave a joint talk with my buddy Darius (from Microsoft) on Java/.NET web services interoperability. It was a bit nerve-racking, we were on stage in front of probably close to a thousand devs, and I could barely see the audience with the kleig lights pointed down at us. I’ll tell you this much, either the Microsoft events people have way too much money on their hands, or else they just plain love to have a good time. It was quite the show. And the .NET tools are pretty decent compared to what’s available in the Java world at the moment.