Ok, so tonight's keynote with Scott Hanselman was interesting to say the least. Hanselman is always fun to listen to, and I would consider him a pretty brilliant presenter. Today, while waiting for his keynote to start, he showed a bunch of interesting things on the projectors. As I sat down, he had legacy machines booting, or at least showed the boot sequence of old Mac OSs, Amiga, Commodore and Windows. Quite funny…and after that, he just browsed around the web showing off a bunch of really funny websites. Sites like http://sometimesredsometimesblue.com/ and http://isitchristmas.com/. He also showed off a video with Steve Ballmer singing, an org-chart of Microsoft with each unit pointing guns at the other. And yes, he also covered in depth his relationship to Scott Gu… And the some!
And however ridiculously funny it was to hear him talk, and hear him joke at the expense of Microsoft and boost a few open source projects, it was not the main attraction. The main attraction was when he found a missing feature in ASP.NET MVC, said that he wanted it fixed but that they were too busy. So he open sourced ASP.NET and asked one of the Mono guys to fix it by getting it off Codeplex using Git… Very funky!
So the moral of this awesome presentation, besides the fact that you should never skip a Hanselman presentation, is that ASP.NET is now open source on Codeplex. And not the “here is the code you can look at it” type of open source, but the “here is the code that we are currently working on and checking in several times per day and you can send in fixes and new features” kind of free. It obviously wont be open for anyone to just add new stuff, there will be a serious process before anything external is accepted, but at least there is a chance that we can see some really funky stuff happening with the help of the community.
And no, I wasn’t stuttering in the heading. At the end, Hanselman found it too exciting for him as a single Scott to handle on stage, so he invited Scott Hunter to join him. But not even that was enough, the two lesser Scotts as they called themselves wasn’t enough, so Scott Gu had to join them as well…
And as a side note, to be at Microsoft and be allowed on a stage talking about development, you apparently need to be named Scott… 
So as a conclusion, this keynote was the best in a long time, not because of the message as such, and especially not because of the long boring segment at the end with all three Scotts, but because Hanselman knows how to deliver. As I write my post, more and more funny details from his talk keeps popping up in my head…things like Hanselman opening a browser and typing in google.com and then erasing it and typing bing.com before pressing enter…but I guess you must have been there to get it…