VSLive! NY: That's a Wrap
RDN editors Jeffrey Schwartz and Kathleen Richards were in New York
City for the
VSLive! New York conference
this week and came away impressed with the amount of activity and forward-looking
presentations at the 15-year-old confab.
In fact, VSLive! seemed to officially kick off the run-up to Microsoft's Professional
Developers Conference (PDC), slated for the last week of October. For instance,
VSLive! featured a number of presentations germane to Microsoft's Oslo software
modeling and enterprise repository project. Oslo is widely expected to play
center stage at PDC next month. You can read more about Oslo and Microsoft's
modeling efforts here.
Brian Randell, a senior consultant at MCW Technologies and panelist at VSLive!,
said Microsoft seeks to broaden programming to a much wider audience with Oslo.
"The idea behind this is they want to make building complex systems easier,
and there the big word is modeling," Randell said.
Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist at Magenic Technologies, warns
developers not to expect too much too soon. "It's important to realize
that this whole Oslo initiative is an umbrella term that's talking essentially
about a 10-year vision."
Another highlight of VSLive! was Microsoft's aggressive push in the area of
Software plus Services (S+S) and cloud computing. As Kathleen reported
yesterday, Microsoft is pulling together a robust story around the S+S concept
even as it forges a continuum between hosted apps, custom line of business apps
and Web services.
Also highlighted at VSLive! were a few things Microsoft is unlikely to showcase
at PDC. Among them, the large
uptake among attending .NET developers of the new Google Chrome browser.
By all accounts, Chrome looks like a very credible competitor to Internet Explorer
8. And its innovative use of JavaScript and tight links to Google Gears (which
is embedded) could make it a formidable platform player down the road.
Perhaps Paul Cosgrave's show-opening
keynote set the tone. As commissioner of New York City's Department of Information
Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), Cosgrave said he has seen growing
activity around both Microsoft .NET- and open source-based solutions. Microsoft's
platform efforts are broader and more ambitious than ever, yet the choices in
front of dev managers seem to be multiplying rather than narrowing.
What do you think of Microsoft's broad efforts to drive its S+S strategy and
what must it do to fend off Google's latest offensive? E-mail me at mdesmond@reddevnews.com.
Posted by Michael Desmond on 09/11/2008