After a year off due to lack of travel budgets, we held the CDT Summit again this week this time at the Ericsson offices in Montreal. It was a great summit and proves again why we do these things. Many times I looked up during the meetings and then through the evening events and saw people from different places talking to eachother, laughing, sharing stories and experiences. You hold these things to have technical discussions on the issues of the day and plans for tomorrow, but the real value is the relationships we build working together face to face. You just can’t duplicate that on-line.

Many thanks to our hosts at Ericsson, Marc Khouzam and Dominique Toupin who worked tirelessly in the weeks leading up to the summit and fought through all the infrastructure issues you end up running into during these things. It all worked out superbly in the end, despite our ribbing them about it :). Thanks guys!

Also thank you to our sponsors from Ericsson, Eclipse Foundation, Wind River, Texas Instruments, Mentor Graphics and Google whose financial contributions made this all possible. We had a very special event on the first night and got a sense of the history of Montreal and a party in a unique setting. Not to mention the superb meals we had for lunches and breakfast, to fuel our efforts during the summit. It really made us comfortable and let us focus on the work at hand.

I have a lot to write about on the topics we discussed. There was a wide variety and some of these things will be of interest to the general Eclipse community as we work to make the Eclipse the best IDE for C/C++ developers in the industry, which is not always an easy task given the general nature of Eclipse. But I’ll blog about those things over the next few days.

My biggest thanks go to the 30+ people and their employers/sponsors who allowed them to travel and take the time out to contribute to the CDT summit and to the handful of people who attended remotely through my CDT conference bridge and Webex account. These summits are most successful when the people come with the mind of working with the rest of the community to do something greater than they can do on their own. As I mentioned to James on his way out. It’s why we do open source: “to have some fun and to change the world”.

More later…