Thursday, September 28, 2006

Microsoft day report

Well I had a good time on Tuesday. I got to see demos of Windows Vista, Office 2007, Sharepoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I also got to try out Virtual Server 2005 and Sharepoint on the Microsoft Bus. I got a break and left again at 5:20 for the NWNUG meeting.

I have to say that the products that really stood out at these sessions were the Sharepoint and Virtual Server for me. I could really see myself using these tools. Don't get me wrong I thought that Windows Vista was very pretty and had some cool new features that will be nice to have but the fact that I can haver virtual computers for free is so sweet.

Also with sharepoint I am very excited about not having to write my own intranet. I'm going to have to do some more reading about it but it looks like you can integrate it with some of their office servers (I know next to nothing about this). The presentation was too fast for Sharepoint but it looked really cool.

At the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting there were lots of tutorials going around. We had a presentation done by Jason Follas. He talked about Delegates in C#. "Basically it is a pointer to a function." It was a very good presentation. I'm awaiting a downloadable version of the .PPT file. I couldn't catch everything on the first swing.

Next was Greg Huber who did a presentation on Microsoft Atlas. Though he explained it isn't called Atlas anymore that's just it's code name. Now they are going with Microsoft AJAX something something. And there are two diffent ways of making your web site look like a desktop application. One is "server centric" with more overhead or there is "client centric" with less overhead but more of that pesky javascript.

The meeting was a good time I was told that the turnout was less than usual but I enjoyed myself. Plus thanks to HCR ManorCare we had a great view to downtown Toledo, a great board room to meet in and some Papa John's Pizza. Additionally I got a free book in their per-meeting raffle thanks to Microsoft.

Next I'll let you know about my trial of the demo software that Microsoft gave me.

2 comments:

Jason Follas said...

Mark: Still working on putting the presentation into an article format. I'd rather do this than just point the PPT, because it will provide more of the conversational type of information that was not on the slides.

laser said...

I'm looking forward to seeing that. Right when I went home I looked in one of my books and low and behold there was a chapter on delegates and events. I guess that I skipped over that part.