The Ottawa launch started with us arriving in town last night. Ottawa is one of my favourite cities in Canada, and certainly my favourite in Ontario. As a result, I was really looking forward to it. The trip started a little rough with a couple flights to Ottawa being cancelled and then me forgetting my jacket at gate 122 in Toronto airport. The dumb part is that they announced a lost jacket just before the plane left the gate (with everyone seated), but I was already deep into conversation with my two seat-mates. Anyway, a quick call to Toronto Airport from Ottawa solved the problem after I was patched back through to gate 122. The jacket was there and we were good to go. My Swanndri jacket is particularly important to me as I picked it up when Annie and I were married in New Zealand five years ago.

We drove from the airport to Microsoft Canada. We were late and were denied admittance at first by building security at Microsoft Ottawa. Note that the building has several tenants, so security was not MS-specific. Anyway, we explained the situation and got past that. Odd. We then spent the next hour with a bunch of local Ottawa .Net folks. We had some great conversations with the local developers over beer and cheese. I spent about 30mins talking with one guy in particular. We had a very interesting conversation about dynamic languages and some of the subtleties of anonymous delegates and methods in C#. I certainly knew about anonyomous delegates, but didn’t know about the subtleties that he mentioned. We talked more about the way that these work today at the launch and I now have a better idea. I’ll post more on this later.

After the beer and cheese, we headed to dinner with Barry Gervin of ObjectSharp. He's the left-most guy in this pic. Definitely a very smart guy. He's a regional director for a bunch of Microsoft technologies and also seems to like Italian food.