Tuesday I went to a local “Silverlight 2” presentation put on by AZGroups, a local developer/designer organization. I’m glad I went. It was top notch–especially for a free event. It was kind of like a Readers Digest version of Mix08–although without the party at Tao. Fine by me, I don’t drink.
Scott Guthrie, recently promoted to VP of “all things developer-oriented” at Microsoft was the main presenter–in fact, he gave two presentations. One on the Silverlight 2 Beta and another on the new MVC framework for ASP.NET. Both were easy to follow, well organized and well presented. I walked away with the impression that Silverlight is getting ready for prime time and now that ASP.NET has MVC support, it deserves even more respect too.
I particularly like where Silverlight is heading. You can now develop in it much like you can with WPF. No more clumbsy Javascript, unless you want to. No more struggling with conflicting names when embedding content. Even better performance. Great debugging support. And a developer friendly ability to create UserControls. If you have had any doubt about Silverlight, you’ll want to check out Silverlight 2. If you’re new to WPF, it might take some time to get up to speed, but it’ll be worth it.
In terms of the MVC model for ASP.NET, all I can say is finally. It’s not always needed, but this is a welcome addition to the platform–especially for those of us that like to build out unit tests.
As I sat listening to Scott talk, I started realizing something. And I know this may sound awkward, but for a VP, Scott sure does know his stuff. Further, he’s quite approachable. No entourage. No PR person filtering the conversation. During a break to stretch my back, I took an opportunity to chat with Scott for a few minutes about Silverlight. Again, I could tell he knows his stuff. And he didn’t seemed bothered in the least that I was asking him questions.
I kept thinking about this more and more and while driving home I kept coming back to how impressed I was with Scott. Here he is, giving some technical talks in Phoenix, when he could be back in Redmond, doing….well, VP things. Nope, he’s spending time with local developers and designers.
Between Scott’s excellent blogging and events like this, I can’t help but imagine what Microsoft would be like if more of the VPs were like him. Don’t get me wrong. Variety is good and there are many roles to play in a large company like Microsoft, but Scott’s down to earth nature is refreshing.
I’m so impressed, that I wouldn’t mind if one day Scott took over the whole shooting match–even Windows and Live and Office (it is essentially a dev platform after all). I’d like to see him become the future of Microsoft. That’s just my little take on it.