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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