My biased/skewed/technically dubious/naive/ridiculously biased summary of the MSDN Roadshow event yesterday in Reading, from my view-point as a Micro ISV...

 

LINQ - Yes the Orcas language enhancements are good, yes LINQ will save lines of code (and thus maintenance), yes I could probably live without it. For a little while.

 

AJAX - Yes it's good, yes the controls are extremely well thought out and useful, yes I can see that it would require a minimal amount of time to modify an existing site to use it, yes I can see how it can give just that little bit of UX polish on say a product marketing site to keep the user there slightly longer so hopefully the message will get through that your business product is actually genuinely trying to help make their life easier.

 

WPF / XAML - I've talked about this one in my previous posting, but generally excellent.

BARF *as now* = 60%, purely as most of my business customers are still on XP Pro and won't like the idea of installing .net framework 3.0 just yet, so there is a bit of a natural sales barrier there at the moment.

BARF *next year when everyone is on Vista* = 100%. I just can't see anyone seriously starting new development using grey windows and rectangular controls.

 

"WPF/E" - Looks like a serious contenter to Flash, but I don't quite see the advantages over AJAX plus it needs a download to run (and yes I know that Flash does/did too...)

 

Windows Live - Hmm, really not sure about this one. Are business people really going to use live.com as their main homepage, and what are the business uses of Live Gadgets? I *get* Virtual Earth for companies that have GIS data, and I can see how you could create a customer support Bots in Messenger and have an activity that opens a relevant support knowledge base page, but I'm just not sure about the live.com homepage mash-ups. I think that's because the content isn't quite there yet and to be fair, I lack enough imagination to see how it's going to be of benefit in a business environment.

 

Now, Office Live I really like...

 

Regards

Stuart

 

P.S. Yes, yes, I know okay! - I'm aware of the irony that technically this blog sits within live.com. (Ahem, coughhipocrite cough cough). 

:o)

 

 

 

* = 'Business Application Relevance Factor'

 

Just a quick note to say I'm trying out what looks like a good screen capture and annotation application called SnagIt from techsmith.com.

 

I'm intending to use it for static screen shots of our software on our site processbridge.com.

 

I'll let you know what I think soon!

 

Regards

Stuart

Well, I've been looking at a number of forum options for running our product community forum, and I think we are going to go with the excellent Telligent Systems forum software.

 

The main reasons are that I've used them before and was very happy with their level of customer service (although that was a couple of years ago now - hopefully they haven't changed much since!). Also, they handle my favorite geeking forum on the asp.net site at forums.asp.net which from a style point of view has the nice, clear qualities that I think make a genuinely usable forum.

 

I note that Telligent are now offering a hosted version at www.communityserver.org (click on the 'Instant Community' link if you are interested), which is what I think I'll use for the time being at least, as quite frankly having someone else hosting stuff like this will reduce the time taken to maintain the forum (which obviously means more time for developing higher quality software!)

 

Stuart