On April 23rd, I gave a session on .NET Interoperability and it covered areas like COM integration with .NET and vice-versa. One of the more interesting parts was the integration of Java with .NET. It was an excellent learning experience for me, since I've not worked on Java for many years. There are many ways that Java and .NET can interoperate and the most common model is the usage of integration bridges. These are applications that leverage either .NET or Java features to ensure that one platform's object appears as the other platform's object and vice-versa. For this session, I had to learn one such integration bridge called Ja.NET. This bridge leverages the .NET remoting infrastructure and provides integration between Java and .NET and in a seamless manner. Using Ja.NET, .NET objects can interact with Java and vice-versa. The bridge ensures that Java objects look like .NET assemblies. Finally, there was some time spent on performance related issues and how the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey will alleviate some of the issues.
Overall, the session went on quite well and the questions were also very good. Many of the attendees were working with interoperability and it was good to hear and answer the kind of problems that people face.
Finally, got there and its over :-) The entire summit went on like a flash and it all seems like a dream. Meeting so many people that till now I've seen only in the newsgroups was a real experience. The weather in Seattle was very co-operative and the overall logistics of the event was fantastic. Got to take snaps with a lot of people and these will be uploaded to my site soon. Overall, it has been a good experience and the travel of 24 hours to get to Seattle from India was worth it....