I mentioned that I attended an MSDN event yesterday and while I didn’t find it extremely useful to/for my individual business, I thought I’d sign up and try a different one in December.

Rory Blyth, who put on the event in Tumwater did a decent job, and I talked to him during one break and found out that he has a blog (he’s also the co-host of .NET rocks — I knew I’d heard him somewhere before!), but honestly, I didn’t think that much of the discussed event material itself (sorry, Rory). Haven’t checked out the CD yet, so maybe the really good stuff is there. Here’s some random thoughts:

- Infopath seems cool but it needs a client run time — badly. What are developers supposed to do, pack in the cost of Infopath ($200) into their projects? Somehow I’m not sure this will have any serious impact. Sitting next to me another developer was whispering “Adobe” and I have to agree with him. Acrobat has forms integration and a free client runtime (Acrobat), so I hope Microsoft will look into making some sort of run time before launching this. Yeah, yeah it’s beta, I know.
- Rory can draw some funny smiley faces using Microsoft Paint! Better than I could do on the fly.
- ASP 2.0 has some nice additions coming but I’m not sold on it for the type of work I’m doing for clients on the web. I see it as good if developing for/on Microsoft servers but the problem for me anyway is most of my clients online are not using Microsoft servers (except maybe for Windows Media streaming). Desktop, Pocket PC and Tablet PC development is something I’d like to get more into, but I don’t get a whole lot of calls for that type of work currently. The presentation seemed to be aimed at comparing ASP 2.0 to a PHP/JavaScript environment and if I were to get a job where I had a choice of the server environment I’d choose PHP/JavaScript over ASP/JavaScript. It might be that this choice would be wrong though, and I’d like to continue to learn more about when and why ASP would make sense over PHP. I realize that wasn’t the thrust of this seminar, but it would have been nice to get some of that information from some seminar, someday.
- I like how ASP 2.0 helps with generating the necessary JavaScript, but I’m not really a fan of generated code either. It usually sucks, like in the case of most of the FrontPage code that gets generated (bloat problems).
- XPath - I’m excited about this XML DOM viewer. It seems to be simple to use and like it might be a handy tool to work with. I was thinking about hacking up something simple like this for myself
- I haven’t installed the .NET 2005 Beta 1 download yet nor looked at the samples provided to play with them more. Think I’m going to try that on my laptop … but over on my laptop I couldn’t get the Visual Studio express projects working and ultimately gave up, so I wonder how it will go with this beta. My laptop can handle a bit of thrashing, but my work computers can’t. I’m sure after checking that out I’ll have something to say (assuming of course that there isn’t an NDA built into the licensing agreement).

You can signup for MSDN events — find out when they are coming to your area, attend the event, and then trackback or comment for me here so I can read up on your thoughts about these events. Find out what you learned and what I might be missing out on.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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