I went to FOSDEM yesterday. I never got around to it in previous years, something always got in the way. But I'm really happy I made it this year, even though it was only for a few hours.

So I attended Miguel De Icaza's talk on mono, which was very interesting. He's a very good speaker! He gave a good overview, and I was surprised that he mentioned boo several times. I've been lurking on the boo mailing list for quite a while now, and it's definately something I want to get into, time permitting. I simply had no idea it was already this popular. Ironpython was given a few minutes as well, and the performance stats are pretty impressive (I had seen them before though). The embedding of mono in games for scripting purposes was also pretty cool. During the workshop later that day, Miguel also briefly demonstrated an embedded boo interpreter in, I think, Banshee. Sweet stuff.

Another thing he mentioned was the IKVM project, which is also very impressive. I had looked at it before, and I was thinking this time that it would enable me to use the Eclipse Modelling Framework on mono.

It's making me unhappy as a C++ programmer though. :(

Hmmm. Strange, I just realized I haven't seen any eclipse related presentations on the schedule, but maybe I didn't look carefully enough.

Miguel also jokingly mentioned that "unlike java's generics, the dotnet generics actually work". I haven't read any criticism of Java's generics yet, nor have I used them, so I obviously can't know what he means. It's been a while since I messed with Java... (to be investigated)

More apps mentioned: Monodevelop (nothing new here, but I saw some people get really excited. I mean *really* excited, like, 'I hope they didn't spoil the seats' excited), and Reflector (neat!)

Oh, and he's embarrassed they haven't got any proper debugging support yet. "Real men don't need debuggers". (cough, cough)

I watched the KDE 4 presentation for half an hour, but after miguel's presentation, it was shockingly amateuristic. I'm sure they have some good things going there, but I'm just not a KDE person and they definately failed to convince me.

Unfortunately, attending the mono presentation meant I had to miss the SQLAlchemy and Elixir presentation, which is a major bummer as am also very interested in sqlalchemy. Crap. But there were a lot more presentations I wanted to see, so I'm hoping there's going to be some video material available for download on the fosdem website eventually. (or at least just the presentation documents).

And it's a damn shame I didn't take my (euh, my wife's) photo camera with me.