it@cork Web2.0 Conference

Event type: Conference

Date: 2006-06-08

Rating: 4 out of 5

As sponsers of the conference, it was only fair that Microsoft was given the opportunity to present their Web 2.0 wares. I talked to Rob the previous night to discover that he is an evangelist from Microsoft’s Platform and Developer Group. I’m a big fan of this type of role within companies. Good evangelists can transform the image of a company and really re-invigorate employees as I believe Robert Scoble has done for Microsoft.

Rob gave a very entertaining presentation on some of the newer MS Visual Studio tools and ASP.NET. MS kindly provided to all attendees a free CD with the latest betas on it. All of the code that Rob presented was free and much of it was opensource. He used his girlfriend’s web-site as the basis for showing how easy it was to generate web applications using ASP.NET and ATLAS.

He was a brave man to be typing code live on stage and showing the resulting web output. But it all worked very smoothly and the ease with which he could change page behaviour and add things like RSS feeds was genuinely impressive.

He summarised some of the key attributes of ASP.NET 2.0 as follows:

Data Driven Web Apps
XHTML
Accessibility
The right abstractions

ATLAS is free platform for building AJAX apps

client side Javascript libraries
Server side controls
works with most mainstream browsers
control toolkit is opensource
adding ajax to his demo webpage was 5 lines of code

One of the most impressive aspects of the demo was that it was all done in Firefox. I have to say that MS really are “getting it” now. Of course they are doing this for solid business reasons rather than any sense of altruism but that’s what being a business is all about.

[tags]it@cork, Web2.0, Web20, Web2Ireland, Atlas, ASP.NET, Microsoft, Robert Burke[/tags]