At least in my opinion… The seminar I went to yesterday was mainly about Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
that should officially be released this fall. Through the years I’ve
gone to a number of seminars, and I’ve always thought that Microsoft are very professional when it comes to holding seminars.

Like yesterday:
A nice venue (SF Skandia
in Drottninggatan in Stockholm), good snack options in the breaks, nice
and not too pushy Microsoft partners standing outside the hall with a
considerable amount of candy…

But also because the speakers were professional, especially Johan Lindfors who I find to be a good
and enthusiastic speaker without being to perky and colored by his company.
When it comes to speakers, I prefer that they come across as an individual, and not just
like a puppet preaching blindly about their company, and yesterday I got a positive experience when it come to this.

Unfortunately the seminar was too little about web development for me, but I guess I have myself to blame not reading the agenda carefully enough to see that ASP.NET 2.0 wasn’t mentioned. Apparently, they’ve had seminars about that prior to
this one, but I’ve been to busy with other things to notice those. So now, when I had the time, it wasn’t a 100% right.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear about the news in the developing environment, the possibility for different roles in a project to perform their tasks through Visual Studio Team System, especially when it comes to testers who seem to get a very good environment.
I was also happy to see that SQL Server 2005, among other things, offers a lean way to format XML through PATH (previously, it has, for me, mostly been about getting XML as XML RAW and then formating it with XSLT. An unnecessary step, so I welcome the new formating options).

Overall, as a developer, I have to say that I’m impressed by Microsoft’s .NET venture. I really think it’s a step in the right direction and the simplifying and possibilities that are offered to developers are very very good.
Sure, ASP.NET doesn’t generate perfect code, for instance you can’t generate valid XHTML and it bothers me with their BrowserCaps that has the notion that Internet Explorer is the most superior web
browser and that all others should be served HTML 3.2 and can’t handle
any on-thy-fly changes.

But it seems they’re going to solve this with ASP.NET 2.0, at least when it comes to theformating of the generated code from WebControls.

Also inspiring to see that SQL Server 2005 uses XML Schema according to the W3C recommendations, that C# is standardized by ECMA and so on.

The only area where they appear to think that they’re above standards is with their Internet Explorer and its shortcomings. My big hope is that they will really face this problem with IE 7, and then maybe there’s hope!