TechEd 2007: What Did We Learn Today?

• How scalable will the .NET Framework actually be? There are many dimensions to the notion of scalability in computing languages. BASIC has proven to be among history's most versatile, scalable lexicons. Java has endeavored to be versatile enough to enter the realm of things you wear on your belt and your wrist.

  But the engineers of dynamic languages are working to make .NET scale into an old and almost abandoned area of programming: the part where we used to have fun. On Friday, Mahesh Prakriya used IronPython and Ruby (whose Microsoft version will soon be IronRuby) to help locate a place in our hearts for programming again, with demonstrations like turning handwritten text into speech with six lines of Python code, and making XNA spaceships fly through asteroid fields.

  It was an enlightening and a nostalgic trip, as the company that truly did set the standard for the runtime language interpreter...reinvented the runtime language interpreter, just a few years after the art was declared dead.

* Will Silverlight have the same spark as Flash? No. At TechEd, Silverlight was on fire. It was the promise of a scalable, vector-driven front end for every conceivable type of Web application. We even saw it being leveraged by Prakriya's CLR team to produce desktop gadgets.

One of the better looking demos we saw came from Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, where a Web page combining Silverlight and HTML elements was used to project a flight itinerary using an animated map of the US. The animations are assembled on the fly using flight data provided to the client in XML. So the little airplane taking off from one city and landing in another was logically generated, not storyboarded. And more importantly, look where it's running. Two minutes before, this application took off from Windows. Here you see it landing on a Mac.

If Adobe's hold over the developers of scalable front ends was truly a lock, the excitement over real competition in this field would not have generated a spark here. The ace in Microsoft's hand is Visual Studio, and developers see the benefits in using their principal development environment for use in bridging JavaScript, XAML, and Silverlight. Yes, it's a leverage play. Microsoft has always used its leverage in one department to gain strengths in another. Adobe should have seen this coming.

• Where will "dynamic languages" fit into the .NET scheme? There's a good chance that, judging from Prakriya's and others' demonstrations this week, dynamic languages could be the .NET scheme for a good segment of developers. There's a realization now that some of the business-specific tasks for which complex applications have been written, could have been accomplished on a smaller scale using a simpler language.

  As the distinction between the Web application and the application blurs even further, Silverlight may end up doing more than just beautifying airlines' reservations sites. When that happens, Silverlight could very well provide the front end consoles for dynamic languages to operate and thrive. And yes, that's another leverage play.

• The unexpected development of the week: The fizzling of Unified Communications as a topic. This was a big deal at WinHEC just three weeks earlier, but it didn't register so much as a blip on developers' radar here in Orlando. This could be a problem for someone who argues it can acquire a chunk of the telecommunications market because communications are services and services are software and Microsoft is a software company, as the case was made in May. If that truly is the case, then software is developers and developers are the base of interest, and the developers are not interested.

  The reason for that may be pretty obvious: There's not a developer program around UC like there is for hardware partners. If Microsoft intends to leverage its software strengths to gain a foothold in a huge new industry, then it needs to tap into its software brain trust. That brain trust was in Orlando this week, and no one extended the invitation. Microsoft may not get too many more chances to extend that invitation before it gets vetoed altogether.

We've gathered a lot of information this week, some of which you actually haven't even seen yet. So yes, we'll be providing more in-depth features and interviews on the issues and topics we covered in Orlando, all next week on BetaNews.