Well, I'm off to Seattle for the Microsoft Technology Summit. I was invited to the event by an evangelist who saw me speak at a local PHP user's group meeting. From what I saw at MIX06 and from what I'm hearing now it looks like Microsoft is really trying to embrace (and extend) open source standards and technologies. At one point a guy even apologized for MS not having upgraded IE in several years. Thank you!
That being said I am both excited and disturbed by what I am seeing in WPF and XAML. The phrasing at MIX06 was 'HTML on steroids', but it's not that at all. You can't write XAML in Notepad, browse to it, and see the result the way you can with HTML. And you can't right click on the output and select View Source and see the XAML code. Both of these things, while they seem trivial, are the reasons that HTML really took off. HTML is easy to write, requires no development tools, and is easy to inspect and reuse. So people can learn from each other. Not to mention that the XAML apps won't be Google searchable.
These are issues that I need some answers to. I certainly don't understand everything about XAML but from what I can see it looks like Flex and suffers from a bunch of issues that Flex does. In particular it seems to me like the pitch MS is giving is that the whole app needs to move to XAML instead of HTML. Which is what I saw from Macromedia/Adobe about Flex. And that's just not realistic. HTML is here to stay. And in particular with Ajax it looks like DHTML will be here for a while. So companies like Microsoft need to be realistic about just what they can expect in terms of technology adoption from their customers. Flex or XAML widgets? Yes. Flex and XAML applications? No.
Posted by jherr at April 10, 2006 11:15 AMuh huh.
Posted by: bsaz at April 10, 2006 01:17 PMhe knows his audience :)
- yeah it went over my head too
It's a mixed blog. I tried the technical stuff in one and the personal stuff in another, but it's a pain in the ass, so I just do both here now.
I do know my audience though. This one was primarily for Dru, Mel, and any other tech types lurking. I thought WPF was going to have a big impact. Now I think it's just going to start chomping away at the Flash market. And I wanted the techie types to find out about that.
Anywho... Wow, what a West Wing ender!
Posted by: jherr at April 10, 2006 09:39 PMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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