Zeepe.com

Scott Guthrie is a gentleman ...

... and highly intelligent to boot. The latter you might expect - he is, after all, the Corporate Vice President within Microsoft's Developer Division who runs the development teams that build CLR, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Forms, IIS 7.0, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, and the Visual Studio Web and Client Development Tools.

But it took a particularly inept demo of Zeepe - by me - to highlight the former quality.

We already knew that Silverlight would prove to be an important step change for the development of in-browser applications and - because anything that is good in a browser on Windows can be made significantly more powerful when taken out of the browser by Zeepe - I had arranged to meet up with Scott for 10 minutes at Microsoft's Las Vegas MIX07 event to make sure that he 'got' the Zeepe framework. And meet we did.

I could blame it on the after-effects of the previous night's fish, or the fact that I was kneeling in a busy public walkway balancing an unfamiliar laptop on a bad reproduction of a Louis XV love seat, or simply claim a growing age intolerance to shifting timezones.

Whatever, I gave Scott a real turkey of a demo and almost certainly left the poor guy no better informed about the importance of Zeepe after 5 minutes than he was when he woke up that morning.

And yet he smiled, and nodded, and breathed "Cool" in appropriate places, and in general worked really hard not to fall asleep.

So thank you for that Scott, you are indeed a gentleman ... and now here's the 10 second version that I should have given you in the first place.