I had the opportunity to travel up to Seattle to spend the last half of the week at Microsoft attending a Web Development Summit with a small collection of open source hackers. This was a unique and interesting 2 day event in which we were given the opportunity to interact with the members of the DevTools team as well as critique some of the upcoming web development technologies. I was a little leery coming in as I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised that at no point during the event did I feel like I was being given a sales pitch or being asked to make the switch. While I myself don’t develop on Windows, many members of the Rails community do, thus by getting the opportunity to speak directly with the IIS and Visual Studio teams I am attempting to do my part to make Windows a viable platform for both development and deployment of Rails based web applications.
The thing I enjoyed most about this event was the people, both the attendees as well as speakers. With a non-Microsoft attendee count of around 20 we had the opportunity to interact in a much more casual, intimate atmosphere then at a normal conference. Of these 20 the vast majority were PHP hackers including core-developers, speakers and authors. This was the first chance I’ve had to interact with anyone from the core PHP community and I have to say that I was quite impressed with their level of technical knowledge and pragmatism. In addition to this elite group of PHP gurus, also in attendance were Jason Gilmore (Open Source Editorial Director for Apress), Andrew Stopford (MbUnit maintainer and fellow TDD junkie), Keith Elder (self-proclaimed Dot Net Pimp), Christopher Schmitt (CSS God), John Bland II (fellow Phoenix hacker and all around Geek), Reg Charmy (Editor of Web 2.0 Central), Tim Heuer, Drew and Dave Bost (all Microsoft Developer Evangelists) as well as many others whose blogs I didn’t happen to get.
Microsoft definitely took this event seriously, and pulled out the big guns when it came to organizing the speaker line up. We had the privilege of being able to converse with industry legends such as Anders Hejlsberg, Don Box and Scott Guthrie. To complement this amazing lineup we also had access to the technical leaders for all of the major development teams (IE, IIS, Atlas, SQL Server, etc) and I was able to discuss getting official support for Rails development/deployment on both SQL Server as well as IIS. In addition to coming to the regular sessions Scott, Brad and many others even made themselves available during the after-hours events and were genuinely interested in our opinions in the current product line as well as what they could learn from the open source communities we represented. As a whole these guys have an intense technical understanding of the products they manage. In many cases they understand the competitive technologies, such as Rails and PHP, at a level higher then many of developers I come across. It always amazes me at the level of technical abilities that these Microsoft managers have been able to retain. They are a group of extremely passionate geeks who have managed to stay technical as they love what they do.
As far as the technologies being presented; I was impressed at times, bored at others. The organizers did a good job pulling together a wide variety of content, unfortunately there was a bit of overlap at times which I guess is to be expected when you have 12 technical sessions compiled by 12 different people. The only session which I completely zone out in was Workflow; not to say this isn’t a cool technology, or that the speaker did a poor job, it just wasn’t something that I’m interested in nor did I see the relevance to the event.
This event was it was completely jam packed, from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. The side effect of this was that while I had hoped to take proper notes and blog along the way, but I never really had a chance to sit down and collect my thoughts. Below I’ve done by best to recall my thoughts on the majority of the technologies which we were shown in no particular order.
The most impressive session was on LINQ, which is technology which I’ve seen before. This query language continues to peak my interest as I’m very impressed with the ability at which it can combine disjoined data-sources, such as XML and SQL, through a natural easy to understand syntax. It was great to have Anders give this presentation as he took a bit of a different spin on it then when I saw Scott give it the week before. If you are doing any kind of database querying or XML parsing using Dot Net 2.0 I would definitely recommend downloading and checking out this cool new technology.
Atlas (to be re-named to something silly and utterly unrememberable) is another technology which I’d seen before, but am still very interested with. If you are an ASP.Net developer I highly recommend utilizing this library. Unfortunately I still see no real reason for those of us not using Microsoft technologies (ASP.Net / Visual Studio) to use this over something like Prototype/Scriptaculous, but I plan to keep an eye on it non-the-less.
For you designers in the crowd you should definitely check out the Expression Web Designer. Unlike Frontpage, this looks like a tool which a professional could actually enjoy using. This time around they have built with a strict adherence to XHTML/CSS which has resulted in a tool which I believe will be a true competitor of Dreamweaver.
The IIS team has come a long way since the 5.0 days. It appears as if they have totally overhauled the existing code-base to make way for a completely modularized architecture in which will allow for technologies such as Ruby and PHP to easily plug-in. I really liked the easy to use config UI which will allow you to manage remote sites over HTTP. I was also impressed with the ability to set per site/directory settings using a web.config file, this will allow for much easier deployment into a shared-hosting environment.
The IE 7 team stood up and apologized for the fact that they haven’t really done much over the last 5 years. That said, IE 7 is shaping up to be a great tool and has definitely come a long ways since the current revision. There are some features in there which are definitely copies of Firefox, and others which are original and very impressive. This update should definitely bring back some much-needed competition into a market in which tabs have been the only real innovation in the last 5 years. One thing to note is that it will be distributed via Windows Update to XP (SP2) machines, so if you’re a [Windows][] user make sure to keep you’re eyes peeled to the system-tray for that update icon during Q4 of this year.
In the areas of dynamic languages Microsoft is still weak, but Jim Hugunin has done an amazing job on Iron Python and they appear to be heading in the right direction. My only complaint with this session was that Jim focused the Q&A time entirely around PHP and basically blew off my questions of when we would see official support from Microsoft for additional dynamic languages such as Ruby.
While the above mentioned talks were great, the most entertaining session had to be when Don Box discussed “Why Microsoft Sucks”. During the open-forum Don asked the crowd what Microsoft could do to better enhance the developer experience. After a series of legitimate suggestions; such as true SSH access, getting rid of the registry, proper console and scripting support someone threw out “make it free”. Don then went into a tirade (in jest of course) in which he said, “F@k you! F@k you! F*@ you! I have a family to feed, do you want to see them on the street? Is that what you’re asking for?” This was a truly hilarious response to a silly remark, and definitely a nice break from the technical demos.
In addition to all of these sessions we heard about CodePlex (cool), WorkFlow (boring), CardSpace (cool), WCF (cool) as well as many, many others. Check some of the additional trip-notes provided below for additional technical details as well as others opinions on this unique event:
- Andrew Stopford (1, 2,
3, 4)
- Dave Bost (1, 2, 3)
- Drew (1)
- Ilia Alshanetsky (1)
- John Bland II (1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,
7)
- Keith Elder (1, 2,
3, 4,
5)
- Paul Reinheimer (1)
- Sean Coates (1)
- Tim Heuer (1, 2)
So with all of this excitement over [Micrsoft][] technolgies there are those of you which may be questioning my loyalty and direction moving forward… Well fear not my fellow Rubyists for I have no intention of trading in my PowerBook and copy of TextMate for VisualStudio. I do however appreciate the willingness of everyone I met to listen to, and engage with, the Open Source development community. Microsoft appears to be moving in the right direction which in the end will help all web developers, Microsoft or not. Overall I came away from this event with much greater respect for the Microsoft development teams and hopefully was able to peak the interests of a few key people to get proper support for Rails on IIS and SQL Server. Many thanks to Sanjoy and Tanya for putting on a great event, as well as to Tim for the invite. I look forward to coming back in the spring to see the results of our feedback!
