I had the pleasure of going down to San Francisco Monday to have dinner with a bunch of well-known bloggers and writers before the launch of IE 7 beta 2. Dean (my boss), Chris Wilson (Group Program Manager of IE platform stuff), Sean Lyndersay (Lead Program Manager of our RSS work), Gary Schare (uber IE Marketing poobah), and I hosted the dinner at Frisson, (a swank restaurant opened and run by the very nice Andrew McCormack, formerly of Yahoo, PayPal, and eBay as I learned from him later over drinks).

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect since we've never done an event like this before. It turned out to be very enjoyable for me (and I hope for our guests). It was a friendly dinner among geeks with the conversation ranging from people we knew in the blogosphere, random technology, whisky (guess who started that conversation), and other interesting topics. We didn't pitch hard, and they were fair and listening.

I'm sure I'll miss some of the names/blogs, but here are a few people I spoke with and what they wrote:

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch Martin McKeay, Network Security and Podcast Roundtable Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategy and Podcast Roundtable
Robert Scoble, Microsoft's Chief Blogging Officer
Tantek Celik, Technorati Niall Kennedy (I know he's a Microsoft guy now, but it was his first day!)
Steve Gillmor, ZDNet and Gillmor Gang Om Malik, GigaOm Victor Loh, ExtremeTech Anne Chen, eWeek

We've posted some photos up on FlickR too under the keyword IE7b2.