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  Some thoughts on Microsoft Tech Ed 2009

  Stii 2:15 pm on August 6, 2009 | Comments: 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: fastcgi, iis7, microsoft, PHP (7), silverlight, tech ed 2009

  

  First of all, let me say that the organization of Tech Ed was simply astounding. Very well organized and very professionally executed. Besides the demo gods playing havoc and SA bandwidth not helping at all, it was brilliantly executed and I want to commend the organizers.

  I’m not going to repeat what has been said already about the demos gone wrong, etc, but here is a couple of things of interest:

  I think a big part of Microsoft’s success can be contributed to their treasuring of developers. They go absolutely out of their way to make life as easy and comfortable as possible for developers. They also treat developers with the utmost respect(?) and try and make a big deal of them. This, I think, creates loyal devs and with loyal devs, they can roll out great software. Visual Studio looks fantastic and the features are amazing. If you look at their language support on the .NET platform it is evident they try and cater for developers to enable them to develop in the language they feel comfortable with.

  I used to develop Windows software back in the days on .NET version 1.1. I know first hand that the Visual Studio IDE is great. It does make you lazy and with their excellent IntelliSense, you almost never type full statements or lines of code. This made it quite a mission to get used to a normal text editor going back to Linux.

  I can see how they successfully make it quick and easy for developers and in effect keep them loyal to the Windows platform. You have to respect that, if anything.

  The other interesting thing was while everyone was struggling to demo smoothly, the one presentation on PHP with FastCGI and IIS7 by Tim Keller did not get a lot of interest, but it was the only presentation which was flawless. Microsoft people don’t seem too interested in Open Source technologies, which is sad really. I’m not sure that I’d ditch my trusty Linux box with Apache for Windows with IIS7 anytime soon, but I’ll say this: Rewrite rules in IIS7 is fall out a tree easy! You simply copy and paste your URL you’d like to rewrite into a dialog and it returns a selection of rewrite options for you. You select the one most suitable and hit save. Done.

  Silverlight, the so called flash killer looks very interesting. In flash, you need a pre-compiled flash movie embedded in your page to get to use flash in your pages. Silverlight is different. You need a javascript library and a XAML file (which is a plain XML file) and you can do Silverlight! That does change things as you no longer need a special software application to make RIA apps. XML and Javascript does the trick! Nifty. It was all a bit over my head to be honest, since I’ve never really made the effort to look into it, but I’m sure I will look into it much more now.

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  Bing.com - a Microsoft product that doesn't suck?

  Stii 12:34 am on June 4, 2009 | Comments: 13 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bing (2), google (8), microsoft, search (4), searchengine

  Could it possibly be?! I mean, I’m NOT a Microsoft fan AT ALL. In fact, the further I can stay away from their products, the better I feel. Luckily I thought I’d give it a shot and check out Bing.com, Microsoft’s new search engine. To my surprise and delight it doesn’t suck!

  

  In fact, I’d go as far as saying it is pretty good. Yes, I’m not getting the same love for this blog from Bing as I do from Google. In Google I rank higher for certain terms than I do for the same terms in Bing. Now I’m not hung up on traffic like the SEO experts. I can imagine it would be a real issue for them. I honestly don’t mind or care.

  I was a little taken aback when I searched for linux and rugby on Bing and it returned a bunch of results from Australia while I’m in South Africa. Not ideal. On a rugby front we’re not the biggest Aussie fans, you know! Ok, thats not too good…

  Then I did searches for “python concurrent programming” on both Bing and Google. The results were almost virtually the same. Ok, so it is not all crap then for technology searches. I did a couple more and I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was little or no differences. In fact, Bing returned more helpful stuff higher up than Google!

  Then I hit pay dirt… I compiled Stackless Python and ran into some system issues. So I copied and pasted the error message into Google (like I would normally do) and nothing really helpful. So I tried Bing and BADA BING BADA BANG! Not one, but a couple of helpful results which solved my problem virtually immediately! Needless to say, I’m impressed… I could have been lucky, true. Thing is, I’m going to use it from now on for technical issues, since it helped me once and I hope it would help me again.

  Forget all the fluff around Bing. By fluff I mean the related searches and funky video/images stuff. That is all superfluous bullshit. What Google gave the world was simple search that delivered reasonably good results. Until now, there was nothing that could really match Google. It pains me to say, but well done Microsoft.

  I do shiver at the thought that Bing is powered by a bunch of Windows servers. That leaves horrible mental images… I tried to check what it runs on, but their headers don’t say, so I assume.