Microsoft Technology Summit 2008 - Review
Monday, March 31st, 2008This is my review of the Technology Summit, have fun!
Wednesday 3/26
Welcome Keynote:
Good intro by Sam. Nice open talk about why we are here.
Introduction to Microsoft Research:
We were presented some interesting products that are in the research department, and got to hear about how Microsoft Research works.
ASP.NET MVC Framework:
Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 introduced MVC to the .NET world. I think that it is good that Microsoft is providing this to .NET developers but it’s a hard sell to people in the open source community that have seen this for years and wondering why Microsoft just jumped on the boat. This is a trend that you will see continue over the next three days.
Silverlight Product Review:
So Silverlight is a much bigger product than i first understood, it actually is a platform to run any .NET application client side. I can see some uses of this, but in the large i think it’s a market that either is not realized yet or that Microsoft hopes that they can force down on everyone else. Where i think Silverlight brings a win is Multi-Platform/Multi-Browser WMP streaming support, so this allows someone to bring WMP content to say Linux or OSX where it was not possible or needed some funky plugin (i.e. Flip4Mac).
The Windows Live Platform:
This was the most open discussion we have had so far. What i got out of this was that no one outside of Microsoft was aware that dev.live.com was even a website. I have developed against Yahoo!, Google and Amazon webservices, and i could not see any reason in the current form why i would even think of using Microsoft Live at it’s current stage. Alot of good suggestions were made by the group but will they be followed up on by M?
LINQ Product Review:
I had not heard of LINQ since i have been out of .NET development for about a year and a half now. But the .NET side of me thought it was pretty cool, even though it of goes against what i have tried to do which is keep as much SQL out of my code as possible.
Olympic 2008 Technology:
Wrong Presentation for the wrong audience. This was a presentation by someone from NBC about what they are doing for the 2008 Olympics… If he stuck to the tech details it would have been a OK topic. But when the words “It’s all about the revenue” came out of his mouth the room turned hostile very quick and i would have hated to be that guy. The one thing i got from this topic is that the entertainment industry is in the same mindset that the music industry was 5 years ago and trying to deny that digital media without DRM is what they will have to do at some point…. it’s just a matter of when do you think they will understand this if ever?
OpenID:
Interesting to me as i have not looked into OpenID much yet. It did get me to activate my OpenID settings on my Yahoo! account.
Party - Novelty Hill Winery:
A wine bar is the WORST place ever to put a bunch of tech people together and expect any sort of good end of day discussion. Most everyone left right after dinner for the hotel.
Thursday 3/27:
Intro to Microsoft’s OSS Lab:
The OSS lab is where Microsoft let’s a group of employees play with *nix equipment. I like that they are helping projects like Samba and providing documentation and code where needed.
IIS7 Product Review:
IIS7 <= apache 1.x nuff said.
Introduction to Microsoft’s Local Software Economy:
Longest.topic.evar, perhaps i just was not interested in how microsoft is trying to bring up it’s brand in developing areas.
Popfly Mashup:
Had to skip this, had work to do.
Internet Explorer 8 Product Review:
IE8 <= Firefox 2.x
Dynamic Languages in the CLR:
It’s cool that they have Python and Ruby in the .NET world.
Robotics, Concurrency and distributed services solution:
Way cool stuff by Microsoft…. this has gotta be the coolest thing i have seen the entire time i have been here. The Robotics studio is very nice and i am going to buy a Lego Mindstorm when i get home and make it terrorize the office!!!!
Microsoft Company Store:
Bought the Xbox360 wireless adapter for PC, Lost Odyssey, a nice pen and laser pointer.
Rock Bottom Brewery:
Finally a place that is conducive to talking with multiple groups of people about tech stuff, lots of space and beer.
Friday 3/28:
Microsoft Home Tour and Center for Information Work Tour:
Had to sign an NDA…. but i would not talk about it anyways…
XNA Development:
XNA 3.0 Preview - Spring 2008 / GA Holiday 2008
Added in Zune game support…. new way to handle music and sound effects in all XNA platforms. It sounds like they may relax or move the $99 Xbox Community Fee so more people can develop games without having to drop 99 bucks a year. Community games will be in the Xbox Dashboard this holiday. They said they have not finalized on the topic of if they will charge for community games or if it will be left up to the developer. The XNA team seems to have their stuff together.
How Microsoft supports Emerging Businesses and Startups:
Not sure why they had us go-to this one….
Overall:
I had a good time, they put us up in a nice hotel and fed us well and sometimes they actually provided interesting topics for us to discuss. Sometimes it felt that some of the presenters were crow-barred in or perhaps put into spots to fill gaps. More technical talks would be great for next year, combined with a format that allows more for time overages and sidebar questions and conversations. Too many times in the first day mostly we were in the middle of a good discussion and had to cut it off for the next topic. All in all i would like to come back next year to continue the discussion and perhaps see if any of the items we brought up for change happen.
