Web technologies are one of gray areas in my career as a professional Software Engeneer. Historically, since I started working closely with .NET platform (2004 I think) I’ve been involved in server side and desktop development, my last mile in user interactions were WinForms, WPF and now Silverlight.
And even if I understand principles of Web technologies, giving I know what things are how they are used, my real experience with development for Web is limited to WCF services hosted in IIS. I don’t have a finalised project done from ground up with any of modern Web development techics.
That’s why I really enjoyed watching today the Mix11’s Web Platform keynote. I know it’s a demo. I know that samples were extremely simplistic. I know that real world requirements are cruel. But I’m trully amazed by how fast basic things are done. You have a dabase backed site running in minutes. You can pick and customize a CMS and while your coup of coffee isn’t finished yet you’re filling the site with content. Entity Framework 4.1 looks very appealing with it’s code first approach. ASP.NET MVC3 scaffolding makes shaping your apps very fast. Oh, and HTML 5, of course…
And I’m impressed how Microsoft accepted Open Source projects as a part of development ecosystem. Just look how seamless OSS offerings/products are integrated in WebMatrix. Take a look at open source package management system - NuGet - filled up with thousands of freely available packages. If you add also it’s own projects that MS is publishing with a open source licence, it’s pretty clear that MS tries to keep up with community and support not only “enterprise” vendors but also mere mortals, you and me.
Also looking forward for tommorow’s keynote. I hope there will be some great announcements for Windows Phone platform. I’m missing very few things, net sockets and multitasking being most wanted. And a legal way to sideload an application will make me (and some enterprises) very happy.