Last week I attended Microsoft WebCamp here in their Silicon Valley Campus. The event was a two day, totally hands on, delivered and attended by developers. According to my estimates there were around three hundred attendees. May be more.
Microsoft showed 3 things:
1. HTML5 and IE9
2. WebMatrix
3. Microsoft Azure
Let us try to take a deeper look:
I. HTML5 and IE9
IMHO, Microsoft with IE9 has worked very hard to catch up with competition (Apple, Google and Mozilla) and in a few cases really surpassed. I started paying attention to HTML5 from April of 2010 when Steve Jobs banished flash from iPad. Samples and demonstrations from Apple with HTML5 support and hardware accelerated CSS on the Mac seemed mind-blowing. Chrome seemed like a good second runner and IE8 was no where in the picture. Since then Chrome has very aggressively riding the HTML5 wave. I almost wrote off Microsoft during summer of 2010. However, I am somewhat amazed that within a short period of 12 months Microsoft bridged that gap. Even though they still lag behind Chrome and FF they have come a long way in html5test (http://www.html5test.com ) and W3ctests (http://w3c-test.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm).
IE9 is holding the lead in several performance metrics. Since this area is highly debatable and contentious I will stay away from this. But the point is. IE9 holds a commanding position in the leaderboard which IE8 could not. They definitely have sped up the Javascript engine!
Also just like Apple and Google Microsoft has put together a site called BeautyOfWeb ( http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/) where they are show-casing some of the coolest items. One area where IE9 pushed the envelope is in hardware acceleration. Fully utilizing the modern day GPU, running significant amount of graphics functions on these chips, getting away from general purpose CPUs and a single-threading model, IE9 is capable of outstanding graphics, animations and smooth transitions. Take a look at IE Test Drive: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
The other area where they have excelled is full SVG support. Applications like mapping and charting for dashboard applications where zooming in and out without pixilation and quality loss is critical remain strong candidates of such technologies. One site which caught my attention was http://www.highcharts.com/
Please note, IE9 is not for everyone. It is available only for Vista and Windows 7 users. Sorry XP!
II. WebMatrix
Microsoft has really tried to simplify web development with this toolset.
WebMatrix is a free web development environment. This tool comes with a compact IIS web-server, a compact database (MySQL or SQLServer) and plugins to hook up external modules called helpers (e.g. FaceBook, PayPal, Twitter, Amazon). It was instant love for me! Here is why. Traditionally, when I setup an environment, I fought for setting up and installing/configuring Apache, installing/configuring mySQL and fighting setup for a day or two. What a waste of time when I would rather be working on my application! Using WebMatrix, just opening a new folder, creating a few pages, creating a data-model and serving up a dynamic page was quite impressive.
What attracted me even more was the ease with which we can put together a FaceBook or a Paypal integration. Now, my friends, I have always needed these in recent web apps and slated 1-2 days to accomplish these aspects. WebMatrix can remove that CRUD!
WebMatrix provides Helpers so that Common Scenarios (e.g. FaceBook Likes, Twitter posts and Paypal payments) are as easy as the following:
@Facebook.LikeButton()
@SimplePay.Execute()
If you like this, please read on. WebMatrix also has hooks to several open source site builders like Orchard, Joomla and Drupal. That way, these site builders can be configured and manipulated from the WebMatrix environment. Web Matrix has about 60 open source templates to build from. WebMatrix also works with PHP.
WebMatrix also provides a special markup syntax called Razor. This makes combining front end code (HTML, Javascript) and backend code (PHP) very simple and readable.
Watch the video in this page for a good idea on WebMatrix: http://www.microsoft.com/web/
In Summary: Microsoft is doing what they do best! Come up with Development tools which are very easy to use and can be democratized. The fact that they are leveraging open source is really a very interesting phenomena.
III. Azure
They made a presentation on Azure. Well, this is a topic for another post.
Best Regards, Somnath
Microsoft showed 3 things:
1. HTML5 and IE9
2. WebMatrix
3. Microsoft Azure
Let us try to take a deeper look:
I. HTML5 and IE9
IMHO, Microsoft with IE9 has worked very hard to catch up with competition (Apple, Google and Mozilla) and in a few cases really surpassed. I started paying attention to HTML5 from April of 2010 when Steve Jobs banished flash from iPad. Samples and demonstrations from Apple with HTML5 support and hardware accelerated CSS on the Mac seemed mind-blowing. Chrome seemed like a good second runner and IE8 was no where in the picture. Since then Chrome has very aggressively riding the HTML5 wave. I almost wrote off Microsoft during summer of 2010. However, I am somewhat amazed that within a short period of 12 months Microsoft bridged that gap. Even though they still lag behind Chrome and FF they have come a long way in html5test (http://www.html5test.com ) and W3ctests (http://w3c-test.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm).
IE9 is holding the lead in several performance metrics. Since this area is highly debatable and contentious I will stay away from this. But the point is. IE9 holds a commanding position in the leaderboard which IE8 could not. They definitely have sped up the Javascript engine!
Also just like Apple and Google Microsoft has put together a site called BeautyOfWeb ( http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/) where they are show-casing some of the coolest items. One area where IE9 pushed the envelope is in hardware acceleration. Fully utilizing the modern day GPU, running significant amount of graphics functions on these chips, getting away from general purpose CPUs and a single-threading model, IE9 is capable of outstanding graphics, animations and smooth transitions. Take a look at IE Test Drive: http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/
The other area where they have excelled is full SVG support. Applications like mapping and charting for dashboard applications where zooming in and out without pixilation and quality loss is critical remain strong candidates of such technologies. One site which caught my attention was http://www.highcharts.com/
Please note, IE9 is not for everyone. It is available only for Vista and Windows 7 users. Sorry XP!
II. WebMatrix
Microsoft has really tried to simplify web development with this toolset.
WebMatrix is a free web development environment. This tool comes with a compact IIS web-server, a compact database (MySQL or SQLServer) and plugins to hook up external modules called helpers (e.g. FaceBook, PayPal, Twitter, Amazon). It was instant love for me! Here is why. Traditionally, when I setup an environment, I fought for setting up and installing/configuring Apache, installing/configuring mySQL and fighting setup for a day or two. What a waste of time when I would rather be working on my application! Using WebMatrix, just opening a new folder, creating a few pages, creating a data-model and serving up a dynamic page was quite impressive.
What attracted me even more was the ease with which we can put together a FaceBook or a Paypal integration. Now, my friends, I have always needed these in recent web apps and slated 1-2 days to accomplish these aspects. WebMatrix can remove that CRUD!
WebMatrix provides Helpers so that Common Scenarios (e.g. FaceBook Likes, Twitter posts and Paypal payments) are as easy as the following:
@Facebook.LikeButton()
@SimplePay.Execute()
If you like this, please read on. WebMatrix also has hooks to several open source site builders like Orchard, Joomla and Drupal. That way, these site builders can be configured and manipulated from the WebMatrix environment. Web Matrix has about 60 open source templates to build from. WebMatrix also works with PHP.
WebMatrix also provides a special markup syntax called Razor. This makes combining front end code (HTML, Javascript) and backend code (PHP) very simple and readable.
Watch the video in this page for a good idea on WebMatrix: http://www.microsoft.com/web/
In Summary: Microsoft is doing what they do best! Come up with Development tools which are very easy to use and can be democratized. The fact that they are leveraging open source is really a very interesting phenomena.
III. Azure
They made a presentation on Azure. Well, this is a topic for another post.
Best Regards, Somnath
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