Webstock mini
There were two web related events on in Wellington last week. Wednesday night saw Webstock mini at the Town Hall. Ingrid has blogged it much better than I could’ve so if you’re interested in the speakers and what they had to say, follow the link.
Something that was announced at the event was that the next full Webstock conference probably won’t be until early 2008. To me that’s rather disappointing and feels like an opportunity lost for WSNZ and Wellington as well. I won’t be surprised if something starts to happen in Auckland in 2007 and some of the momentum from down here is lost. However there may very well be some valid reasons for the wait – we’ll just have to wait and see.
Microsoft’s Expand Your Portfolio
Microsoft, under the super organisational skills of Nigel Parker, lead a tour around NZ to show off their new Expressions toolset. As a MS Gold Partner we’ve been aware of Expressions for quite some time now but hadn’t yet understood what MS was trying to achieve taking on Macrodobia. The message we got was that we “wouldn’t be replacing those tools anytime soon”.
That notwithstanding, the demonstration did show some promise especially around the areas of the WPF/E and XAML stuff. My general feeling around creating new formats, a.k.a. Sony, is that you’re generally being an asshat. But there may be valid reasons for a new approach to the interactive web that Microsoft is exploring – they’ll just need to communicate them clearly. One positive tick for WPF/E is that it is cross-platform compatible from the get-go. Well, almost…
Where almost everyone agrees this will make the most impact and has the f…ing cool stamp is the how the next generation of .NET applications will be designed in Expression Studio and then have that almost seemlessly applied to the application/development. That is a mega oversimplification but go have a look for yourself and you’ll see what I’m getting at.
