ImperialViolet

Dear old M$ came a visiting today to espouse the virtues of .NET. The front row of the lecture theatre was full of systems people (myself included) wearing Apple, Linux and WebSphere T-shirts, so it was a pretty tough audience.

But the M$ guy spoke really well and said only a few dumb things ("ASP is a scripting language so it runs on the client", "You need to R&D of commercial software houses to develop quality products") and it was generally a pretty noddy introduction to .NET.

He demoed VS.NET doing web services stuff (it really looks like web services are a Big Thing (tm) at Microsoft now) and it worked well. But like most M$ stuff, if you wish to change any of the details you have better pre-book the triple heart bypass operation for the stress. He also showed linking a C# and J# (java to you and I) application together, and he used vim to edit the files no less.

I also got to play with a Tablet PC. The handwriting recognition worked well for me (I have the girliest handwriting, however), but it's nothing special. A neat packaging of technology - no great break throughs.

Hmm, that's actually a pretty positive entry about M$ I know, but they are being really nice to us. We (as students of Dept of Comp) can now get any M$ software for free. Don't know why we would wish to, but we could