Microsoft lecture: The good and the bad

Finish writing this post a week ago but forgot the publish and never realized >"< how silly of me...probably that's the side effect of coding too much...

So here's the one-week-delayed post:
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We had a special lecture yesterday conducted by Microsoft guys. They came down and talked to us about HMTM5, Windows Mobile, and Windows Azure Web service. The topics fit CS3216's this year theme: Social, Mobile, and Cloud, which are the 3 directions that the technology world is heading to.

1. HTML5:
- The good: They really showed us the great potential of HTML5 and CSS3. That's what CS3216 students need to know especially when it comes the mobile/cloud assignment. I'm looking forward to the HTML5 workshop to get more knowledge on all the cool stuff that HTML5 can do.

- The bad: IE! I don't like the way they compared IE9 with Chrome during the HTML5 demos. To me it seems like a desperate attempt to salvage the bad image of IE. I downloaded IE9 to run the SVG girl demo (and the others also). It worked fine, better than Chrome I may say, but then when I switched to onboard GPU, IE9 became laggy. Apparently, Microsoft makes use of of their power to accelerate graphics by GPU rendering, which I don't think is a good approach for a web browser. Seriously I really hope that the browser war could stop. It's a pain for everyone, both users and developers. Browsers, unlike OSes, serve only one purpose - running web applications. So what's the point of having too many of them?

2. Windows Azure:
- The good: Windows Azure is easier to set up and configure than AWS. I haven't tried Azure but my friend, who is an expert on AWS, confirms that it is "less painful". I can't say much for now, but will be able to evaluate Azure when I have my 6-month access (each of us will receive one account right?)

- The bad: The presentation was quite poor. It took 10 mins for the presenter to get his computer into Windows, and 5 mins to open Visual Studio. It gives me a not so good impression on Microsoft developers. I would personally prefer a presentation on Kinect rather than Azure.

3. Windows Mobile 7:
- The good: It's the highlight of the lecture for me. The Windows phone is interesting and new, and it opens quite a lot of opportunities for developers like me. Currently the Windows mobile market is much smaller compared to Apple or Android. We could have a higher chance to survive and make a big impact. I'm seriously thinking about making a Windows mobile app for the final project.

- The bad: The Mango wasn't very stable. It crushed at some times, and some applications didn't work as expected. But that's understandable since Mango is still under development. Hope it'll get better.

Well that's pretty much it. I'm looking forward to Google and Amazon!