'elmcity' by Jon Udell @ DemoCamp Toronto 21

Jon Udell was the first presenter at DemoCamp Toronto 21, covering 'elmcity', his project to allow a directory of events by linking in iCal format using delicious accounts as markers for finding the iCal files.

Despite a proliferation of event information on the web in various forms, it's not always easy to bring that together in a useful way. Although "elmcity" seems like an interesting project, I'm not sure that I see elmcity changing that directly. I agree with the problem statement, but the demo didn't make me want to stand up and ask, "How can I get access to this right away?"

Jon took a little longer than most presentations, and thus is longer than YouTube's 10-minute limit, so I've broken his presentation up into two videos:

Gartner: Windows is Collapsing

Gartner says Windows is Collapsing. While I don't believe in industry analysis for the most part, and any headline like this is oversimplified, I'll agree insofar as this:

Microsoft has survived a poorly reviewed operating system before, but they're beseiged right now. If the next version of Windows doesn't get business accolades, we may well have witnessed the beginning of the end. Microsoft isn't going anywhere now, tomorrow, or even next year or the year after, but if they don't make some ground, they're going to be increasingly marginalized as a technology has-been.

Some people would argue they're there already, and have been there for a while, but as long as Windows and Office continued to bring in the Cash, it's hard to argue. If that destabilizes, Microsoft will begin to devolve for real.

Microsoft Developer Tools are Too Easy To Use?

Microsoft does a very good job of making sure that it's easy to get up and running building a program using their tools. Over time, this has shown itself to be both a strength and a weakness.

Skill, Education and Background
With a Microsoft toolset, people with very little skill, education and background in software development and the internals of computers and computing can get started building programs. This is very powerful, and encourages businesses to innovate.

Unfortunately, this also means that people who have learned how to build programs using your tools may have very little skill, education and background in software development. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Tasks: Simple and Complex
It can be easy to accomplish simple, common tasks. Want to build a form, connect the form fields to a database table and allow people to enter data? You can build that in Visual Studio while hardly touching a line of code.

On the other hand, sometimes when you want to go beyond the simple things to the complex things, there's very little support for you to do that. The tools, the technologies and the documentation focuses so strongly on ease of use, simple tasks and beginners that sometimes the "step up" is not only difficult for those beginners, but can be difficult even for experienced programmers, who have a hard time finding the resources and information they need.

Recency
I haven't used many of the Microsoft tools of late, so it's interesting to see that trend continue via 'Just another Blog's hiring experience.

Microsoft Trips Over Own Feet: VSS and VS.NET on Vista

The left hand of Redmond doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing. They're tripping over their own feet. Even with all the mis-steps with Windows Vista, how is it possible that recent versions of two of their primary development tools don't run on their own operating system?

A few months ago, there was a a lot of chatter about the fact that several versions of Visual Studio won't work on Vista, and that upgrading might force you to upgrade the version of the .NET framework underneath. Now it turns out you can't host Visual SourceSafe on Vista either?

Baffling.