Microsoft at Lappeenranta

Nice people from Microsoft decided to visit here at Lappeenranta on their tour of promoting Microsoft technologies and spreading the word on their partner programs and competitions. It was a pleasant show, and I must say I’m impressed of what they’re doing with .NET technologies. They gave several demonstrations about rapidly building useful C# stuff with Visual Studio 2008, and showcasing some of the features about Silverlight.

So, what do they have to offer to a web developer like myself? Silverlight seems really promosing, and if they get the development tools right (and I’m sure they will, they seem to be really good at that), it will offer Flash some serious challenge. I must confess, I’ve taken few attempts to get into Flash, but without much success. I guess there’s nothing wrong with Flash, the tools just make it seem really laborious and time consuming thing to do anything useful.

I’m Linux/PHP guy, but there seems to be a whole lot exciting stuff going on in the MS world too.