Today I helped run Tulsa Tech Fest, and I must say it was awesome.  During the event I went to 2 of Caleb Jenkins’ presentations one over ajax/atlas and the other over WPF, which r0×0rz.

While in the Atlas/Ajax presentation Caleb had the greatest quote about Microsoft I have ever heard.

“Microsoft doesn’t create cool stuff, they enable everyone else to create cool stuff.”

Now, to defend Caleb it was in the context of Atlas itself and how it is extendable. However, the quote is so true I mean google wouldn’t be where they are today if it wasn’t for Microsoft.

BLASPHEMY, is what some of you are yelling.

Here is why though.  Microsoft created the ActiveX object that allows AJAX to exist.  From ajax Google maps, gmail and many other services exist that heavily use the technology and has helped to put google on the map.

So remember Microsoft helps you become Google.

Well I finally installed 64bit windows and got it to work. It was kind of quirky to install I had to install all the new drivers at once, including nvidia, in order for it to work.

One problem I am having is it is a bit sluggish and I have no idea why. I am going to see what I can do about determining the problem. I am not thinking it is anything major but it is stopping me from playing games right now so that isn’t very cool.

Ok, this is just a random thought, but I was thinking and I kind of predict some serious open source vs. proprietary wars coming within the next 10 years. I don’t mean the current geek bickering that you see all the time or the current enterprise level use Linux for blah. I truly see that normal users will become more educated on what open source software is and some beginning to switch to it. At that point I see 2 things happening.

1) Because so many people will be switching back and forth and there won’t necessarily be a winner on either side software is going to get better in general due to competition.

2) This will lead to the spilling out of the geek communities back and forth to the normal end users that don’t know much.

In business, especially in computers, there needs to be a power pushing the way. I think that there is going to be a power struggle, but I don’t know who is going to be there in the struggle for sure. I think that the company that offers the best mix between both OSS and Proprietary, like Red Hat, will come out on top. I don’t however see Microsoft fading into the distance any time soon much like IBM didn’t die when Microsoft took over. I do see them stepping back into second or third place restructuring for the new trends, and then I see them pushing innovation in some areas, mainly development.

I say this as an honest prediction of what I see. I could be totally off on my thoughts. It will be interesting to see what happens.

*This in no way means I love Microsoft and hate open source or vise versa. I love both and see the benefits of both.

Well I went to the MSDN launch party yesterday for SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 and I must say WOW.

It was awesome. The demos were incredible it was absolutely amazing some of the things that were show. Like the building of a complete data driven website with the capabilities of users logging in, registering, and personal preferences without a single line of code. That to me was amazing. I honestly can’t wait to get started with ASP.NET 2.0. Actually, I should be starting this week sometime with a redesign of Lhand.com.

As part of the bonus of going to the launch party I got two cool pieces of software, Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Both are the coolest products in the world, and retail together at 6300 dollars. That, my friends is a lot of money. Not to mention the Resource DVD they gave away with 8 gig of content for learning these new products. I am seeing a lot of cool things coming from having these new products. I can’t wait to get started, especially figuring out Atlas (AJAX), and RSS. From what I understand both are super easy to implement in ASP.NET 2.0

Well need to get to work reading up on this stuff so until next time. Happy coding

Buddy Lindsey

DotNetNuke Blogs – No Respect for Windows Open Source

Woohoo someone who is fighting back agianst Microsoft haters saying unless it is linux it isn’t true opensource.

Shaun Walker reems the people who claim that unless it runs on all opensource software then it is not truely open source. He is fighting and IMO produces one of the most solid arguments I have ever seen.

To me this is a landmark argument for Windows based Open Source projects.

I mean why can’t windows, which has the largest market share of desktop os, have OSS? I mean I would think that starting people out using OSS on windows would be the first step to prove that OSS is good and that eventually you should try other OSS such as Linux.

Anyway I highly suggest you read the post.

Windows is an excellent OS to use. It is one of the easiest out to understand, and get started with. People from the age of 2 to 70 can figure out how to use it fairly quickly. It has awesome configuration tools that are easy to understand and use. In windows I can usually figure out how to configure something with 15 to 20 minutes just by clicking stuff. For example I need to set up SMTP on Windows Server 2003 so I could receive e-mails, and I just started clicking a few things here adding what I “thought” goes there and bam it worked. I knew absolutely nothing about setting it up, but with easy to understand configuration tools I figured it out. With other OS’s I basically had to learn how to configure things from scratch, which when you are in a hurry is not good. Programming for Windows is much nicer with the .NET Framework you can easily program applications for windows, or the web. Windows also has the best IDE of any OS nothing can beat Visual Studio.NET with its intellisence and dynamic coding allow for coding to get done quick.

Windows is excellent for getting stuff done quickly and efficiently. I enjoy using it for all of my development.