Microsoft WebCamps Singapore Day 1

I attended Day 1 of the WebCamps^#1 (4th June), and am quite impressed by Visual Studio (VS) 2010's features and quite keen to start trying out ASP.net MVC2 "programming methodology".

I must admit, I once kept away from the suite mainly due to the non-semantic (and bloated) HTML markup generation. Now that it's been vastly improved, coupled with the focus on MVC (Model-View-Controller) all wrapped in an IDE (Integrated Development Environment), it is probably time to re-visit it.

Furthermore, as a strong opensource supporter, hearing that Microsoft embraced jQuery and packaged it in VS2010 was quite heartening. I only knew about the company's future support for HTML5, but hadn't heard about the former.

Going back to the WebCamps Singapore event, the main speaker for the day is James Senior, a Seattle-based, Microsoft's Web Evangelist.

Two other guys also made short presentations, including Jonathan Wong, Microsoft's technology evangelist, who also helped co-ordinate the RIAction event

At the risk of sounding like an evangelist, I do encourage developers or causal coders to tryout / play around with the Microsoft's Web Platform Installer which gives one click installation as well as nice initial configurations of popular (and listed) free/opensource software. Even if the eventual server isn't IIS (Internet Information Services) based, it is still a great test environment, especially with the redesigned IIS7.5 and the availability of fantastic modules like the SEO Tool (hint: The tool isn't limited to IIS hosted sites.)

Overall, other than some minor hiccups with the projector, I felt that WebCamps Day 1 was enjoyable, fruitful, and left me hoping for more. It's just too bad I won't be able to make it to Day 2 (later today GMT+8).

Oh.. And I really like the Microsoft Web t-shirt... too bad I couldn't get it

On a sidenote, it is quite hilarious when people speak too fast. There was a moment when I heard the phrase "Google with Bing" (FYI: Bing is Microsoft's Search Engine) when it was supposed to be "Google and Bing".

(#1 : Microsoft's Web Camps are free, two-day events that allow you to learn and build on the Microsoft Web Platform.)