A small write up about my experience at TechDays 2010, Geneva, Switzerland. Kind of random thoughts and superficial impressions about visited sessions.
Windows Azure platform
Depending on your requirements can be a cost efficient deployment option. Not sure about development side of things. If it’s covering 80% of your requirements nicely, what about 20% cases it’s not covering? Most of MS technologies/frameworks are hardly known as being extensible.
SQL Azure & Azure storage
Will it play nicely with NHibernate? I’ve seen mentions on the net that all NHibernate tests are passing on Azure platform. Would like to see a real app.
“Tables” as a document store are interesting. Is it supporting Map/Reduce?
Silverlight 4
After few releases and years it will be on par with WPF (as of 4.0/2010).
I’m loving choice of platforms: PC, web and mobile.
Windows Phone 7
I’m a Windows Phone 7 developer! C# & XAML everywhere. VS 2010 & known tools/process. Not convinced on new UI concept. Don’t like the strong accent on social networking. During presentation had a temptation to stand up and ask: “can it make a call?”.
Silverlight 4 Advanced
Definitely, in a few years Silverlight will be on par with features with WPF.
Nice presentation, learned few tricks in Blend and VS 2010. Presenter looked and worked like a real developer.
Microsoft Surface & Multi-touch experience
I’ve skipped a session and took a chance to play with Microsoft Surface installed by one of (i think) sponsors in the hall. I’ve started playing with it between sessions and missed completely beginning of new one. Dropped it and played one hour with Surface and a HP branded mono-block with multi-touch screen.
Multi-touch is working great on Surface: few games, Paint, Maps. Few very basic, specific apps with “intuitive” interactions. I’d like to see how it works in a more business/data analysis/LOB app. But I’m rather skeptical. They had some kind of “business” app on the Surface but it doesn’t worked because some physical “tags” where missing.
HPs with multi-touch screens: Windows 7 is not a multi-touch friendly platform. You can create small nice “photo viewer” applications but this will not make a revolution – the platform is mouse+keyboard oriented. You can look at iPhone/iPad, where the platform is built on and for multi-touch. Windows Phone 7 is a multi-touch platform with few pre-defined styles for basic controls & specific navigation features.
Found a bug with multi-touch – you cannot close a window by pressing “X” button when the screen is maximized. Probably a hardware issue.
And I haven’t found how to show a context menu (right mouse click) in Windows 7 using a “touch”. As I said previously, the platform is not touch oriented.
Conclusion: Touch interfaces offer good user experience in specific devices and apps. Very specialized and artificially limited. But for “traditional” apps it’s not a good choice. And don’t forget the whole Web. Keyboard and mouse are here to stay.