Microsoft Deep Dive Power Breakfast

Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Personal

Skipped class (I wouldn’t have went anyway) today and went for Microsoft’s mini event for developers, called “Deep Dive something Power Breakfast”.. what a long name.. Anyway, there were 4 presentations there, mainly on:

  • Introduction to Office 2007 development. We were shown how to create custom ribbon tabs and task panes. Did you know you could do a POS system on top of Word?
  • Microsoft SharePoint services. Frankly, this was for enterprises with complicated workflows. Didn’t quite follow the workflow creation part.
  • Lap around WPF. I’ve seen videos and even the power point the presenter, Ms Lim Poh Sze used. So it was kinda boring.
  • “Go Go Gadgets”, how to develop a Windows gadget.

The only particularly interesting presentation was using Office 2007 as a development platform. It’s pretty cool being able to add your business logics on top of Word or Excel. One promising advantage of using the XML based file format in Office 2007 was that any application could assemble a Office file (.docx for example) on the fly. However, this process is pretty manual now. There’ll probably be plenty of tools that’ll automate this process, like designing reports in Access.

Poh Sze wasn’t such a good presenter. Overall, I felt she failed to hype up WPF. It made it look sorta like another syntax to define WinForms kinda stuff. But at least she looked pretty :p As for gadgets, lame lame lame. It’s nothing new, and Microsoft doesn’t even give some nifty gadgets that ties in with Windows Live. Yahoo Widgets for example, comes bundled with a bunch of widegets like Yahoo Search, accessing your mail, Yahoo Notepad etc. Microsoft only gives you crap like a clock, stock quotes and RSS. And I don’t know why developers cant use WPF to develop gadgets. Funny.. a gadget that can do 3D tricks will simply blow all other widgets away..

There’s gonna be another Deep Dive Power Breakfast event next month, which is supposed to go deeper into WPF. So I’ll probably be heading to KLCC again then.. hehe, got a nice t-shirt today too.. it reads:

WPF
WCF
WT_ ?

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Permalink | November 17th, 2006

3 Responses to “Microsoft Deep Dive Power Breakfast”

  1. Hang Says:
    November 17th, 2006 at 10:00 pm

    Miss Poh Sze sure sad, when see this blog…

  2. Jonathan Ng Says:
    November 17th, 2006 at 10:20 pm

    why sad leh? I said she pretty wor.. haha.. she should have demo more cool apps for everyone mar.. and she kinda speak too fast also.. haha.. like me..

  3. t3ngf0ung Says:
    November 18th, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    Bout the windows gadget, I 100% agree with you. Everything are expected and even there are tons of widgets nowadays much better than windows’ one. By the way what is WPF? I’m kinda outdated recently.

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