Microsoft Web and Gaming Technologies @ Ualg
So, like I said before, during this weekend I attended an MS event at my University, which, for someone like me who uses exclusively F/OSS, is kind of unusual. However, like I also said before, I am not a zealot, and I like to know what others are up to and how they are evolving (or not), whether it is Microsoft, Apple, etc. I have to admit I was expecting a bunch of zealots (the speakers were all Microsoft Student Partners) and that they were just going to say how good everything was and try and sell us the product, but it was quite different and some of the guys really knew their stuff.
The first day was mainly about web related technologies, together with a Vista and Office 2k7 presentation. Most of it was not new to me, as I usually don’t disregard news about what Microsoft is up to. It’s nice to see that they pay some attention to open standards once in a while, but unfortunately they don’t always make things right (OOXML anyone ?). I also have to admit that I liked some of the changes in the Office 2k7 UI and I actually found them interesting, like the fact that you don’t have lots of things in the screen at once, and only stuff related to the task you’re doing (I always liked minimalism). Yes, the fact that the change was so big might be bad for old versions users, but sometimes you need some abrupt changes if you really want to evolve (or change mentalities), no matter what.
In what concerns ASP.NET and the whole web development platform, I really think that their idea of applying MVC to it (which is still to come) was well played, because right now, things seem a little bit confusing (lots of presentation code mixed with logic code).
Silverlight also seemed really nice, and although most (if not all) capabilities of it were already present in Flash, I kinda liked the way they organized the whole development platform around it (and yes, I know about Flex and all that stuff).
There was also a presentation about AJAX for ASP.NET, which is basically the same as Prototype or other similar AJAX libraries/frameworks.
We also had a dinner with all the guys from the event and, as the good students we are, we went on partying through the night.
On the second day, we had a morning presentation about .NET 3.0 and beyond. First they talked about all the components (WCF, WPF, etc) and then they talked about LINQ, which is basically an ORM for .NET which can fetch data from different sources (databases, XML files, objects, etc). I was a bit surprised that Microsoft hadn’t come up with something like this until now, specially when they have such a huge and complex platform as .NET. They’re kinda late, but at least seems they’re doing it right.
I didn’t attend the afternoon presentation about the XNA game development platform as I had some more important stuff to do and I’m not that much into game development.
All in all, it was actually a nice event, and I didn’t end up making stupid anti-MS questions to the speakers (as some persons were probably expecting I would). I actually ended up helping them once or twice against the “evil anti-MS zealots” on the house.
Now, this doesn’t mean that I’m going back to using Windows or any MS products or technologies, and I still think they are kinda “ev0l” and I don’t approve many of their ideals or methods, but my opinion about them improved a bit, specially about MSP’s which were all a bunch of great guys (and not MS dummies as I expected) and I really hope to meet them again some other day (maybe while working with some F/OSS technologies :p).
Update:
A picture from the event, featuring the MSP’s and NEI’s President Miguel Fernandes and Vice-President Vasco Rodrigues.
