There’s something wrong about that picture, I have to admit. But when I got invited to a round-table style conference at MS, I could hardly refuse. I actually had a good time too. They were discussing their web products, to a small group of start ups. I’ll give a quick roundup of what they discussed.

SQL

I don’t really need to discuss this, I mean who uses MS SQL?

Azure

I can see where/when Azure would be useful, but again, just go Open Source for more control and more options.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 is actually looking quite cool and is set to release by the end of July (shh ). Silverlight currently works on Windows Mobile, when they’ve tested it – but it just hasn’t been implemented yet. Expect to see this in Windows Mobile 7.
MS brag about the cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility of Silverlight, but at the same time they offer no support to Novell with the Moonlight project (to get Silverlight compatibility in Linux).

IE8

There were few IE6 jokes of course, but that’s to be expected. At least MS can laugh at themselves – because the rest of us already are – IE8 offers some interesting features, I just don’t know how useful they are;

Slices allow the user to save a section of the site, like a bookmark but not-quite. It’s almost RSS replacement, but it’s something that I can’t really see taking off on a large-scale. The biggest down-fall of this feature is that it needs hard-coding in the HTML to be able to work, so a user can’t ‘Slice’ any content, only content that has been tagged in the source code.

Accelerators are more interesting, this is the tool that cuts down Copy&Paste steps in the browser. Simply right-click on selected text and you have the option to search that text in Google, Bing *groan* (yes it’s good, but I don’t have to keep admitting it!), Amazon and all other site that you’d expect with this feature. You can also e-mail the text, useful stuff like that. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Firefox already provides a much better plugin (more feature complete. Accelerators doesn’t even have an eBay search).

Deep Zoom

Apart from the goofy name, this software was actually pretty cool. Huge image rendering through Silverlight. Visit the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia page and hit the magic ‘v’ button, then just keep zooming out – you’ll see a nice demonstration.

ASP.NET

People still use ASP? All jokes aside, .NET is a good idea. One development environment for all your applications, whether they are web or desktop. With Mono, it’s almost Open Source friendly too. But ASP? Really? … Just go Java.

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So I went into this meeting thinking ‘Apache + Java > IIS + .NET’, and I came out with ‘FF > IE8′. The Microsoft guys were really friendly, we had a good chat. I didn’t rebel too much, although I was the only one in the room with a MacBook Pro and iPhone, and I may have been the only one asking Open Source questions – but that’s not rebellious, that’s just tech-savvy. MS offer no innovation, they are a bore to the market. People moan that Apple provided no Copy&Paste, it could be said that Microsoft give us too much Copy&Paste.

Quote of the Day: “We’d never try to make our tools the only tools you could use”