I stopped at the office for a couple of hours before catching the flight to Stuttgart. There I met with a collegue that had just returned from the Visual Studio Ecosystem Summit. Apparently they still have a way to go on the ecosystem side of things. Anyway; knowing that I was on my way to ESE, he had picked up a small box of “Naturally Germ Killing Eclipse Mints”. Mylyn came to mind.

This summit was held over three days. Day one was filled with symposia and tutorials. The second day and third day was mostly talks. I managed to get through pretty much only attending the embedded related ones. That is quite good especially considering that the Wind River and MontaVista guys were missing. They usually host many of these talks. Though I do find it discomforting that neither the CDT project lead nor anyone else from that team was able to attend. Also I was hoping to discuss the new C/C++ debugger that Nokia is working on.

There was a lot of great talks, too many to mention. However there were a few that stood out. Following up on older technology; Freescale had someone working on CDI based debugger improvements which was quite interesting. My general impression from the embedded talks is that Java and OSGi is a very much a viable option even on these type of targets. Also the B3 platform got me really exited. I’m really looking forward to the day when I can ditch ANT, Ivy, MS-DOS and bash, replacing these with a DSL crafted for building purposes.

Maybe five tracks is a bit too much? I certainly wish I could attend more sessions. Some presentations have appeared at SlideShare but far from all. All in all a great conference. My only regret is that I forgot to buy a new Knirps as the one I had got stolen…