Yesterday, Microsoft Academic Day (MAD) a story of success that was born and raised in Jordan , out of some enthusiastic Jordanian students leading the .net clubs in Jordanian universities, and starting to spread along the region's .net student communities supported of course by the company, Microsoft.
This is the 2nd ever MAD event, and my 2nd as well!
Here's why i came out with the title up here, based on what i've seen yesterday, and comparing it with the way Oracle Developer Days (The Oracle and Java one that was held on my birthday particularly speaking) where there was a pretty wide space for Open Source technologies around.
Since the very start of the event, the Microsoft personnel had came over open source technologies in his keynote session out of nowhere saying “oh, what interpreted PHP, or MySQL ... we are giving you real technology talk in here !”.
more over, later during one of the ASP.NET 2.0 sessions, one of the guys, I really cant remember if its the guy from compu-base or a .net brain washed student, saying: “la2nno haik a7san, e7na mesh PHP hon” (English: because this is the way it should be, we're not interested in PHP in here).
I mean: I've worked on Microsoft's .net technologies, and on ASP.NET 2.0 particularly, and it is a pretty powerful platform, and supported by a “kinda still buggy if you want my opinion about Visual Studio 2005” but a strong one for sure that you can't really not take into consideration when developing.
But you have no single right to talk about PHP in such a way only because you are a lousy lazy person or a personnel at a company that is considers open source technologies its primary enemy.
PHP and that small shell toy called MySQL is running millions of people's manners and information in the best possible way and with less than 5% of the costs of running the same manners and information with the same reliability and performance with Microsoft's technologies (ASP.NET – MS SQL Server – MS IIS - MS Win Servers).... and the Web says it all!
On the other hand later on, talking about ASP.NET 2.0, the guy from compu-base international, while talking about validating forms data said: “Now its even easier to make it with Visual Studio 2005, no need for any line of Javascript, who's the lousy that writes Javascript anymore, its all here!”.
And another [being-funny] guy talking about Microsoft's AJAX platform ATLAS said: “you need to write code if you are not using ATLAS, you need to write Java .... Javascript in order to do it, who still writes Javascript nowadays, who even likes to write code!”..
Hell Ya! Many got Java and Javascript confused yesterday, despite there's absolutely nothing in common between them but the 1st 4 letters!.... and who do you expect to hire you baby when telling him in the interview “who still writes Javascript nowadays” ... if you don't know Javascript then you should know that you aren't developing web really better than a 15 year old school student using pirate tools!
And isn't the “so-called lousy stupid” Javascript that enabled you to get to this level in development, actually the methods you are using for form validation my dear trainer in Visual Studio comes out in Javascript by the end of the day if you have ever tried to give a look at the generated code at the client side.
& By the way, mostly no one could understand what is AJAX nor examples implementing it until Rami Arafat mentioned Google MAPs and GMAIL. Wasn't that strange after all to find most of the students not knowing about Web 2.0 , neither conceptually nor technically, if there were speakers not knowing Web 2.0 concepts as you might read later in this post in the RSS lousy experiment on IE 7.
Of course the event couldn't but get by Mozilla firefox making it the stupid (i-dunno-why-people-use-it) browser that is used by old fashioned people! Starting from a question made by one of the attendants (a Microsoft .net club committee member with a certification badge on his shirt), asking why ASP.NET components are not rendered properly on Mozilla's browser, of course the answering discussion (where the asking, answering, and a note-to-add personnel were the contributors of it) resulted in making Firefox a non-standard, stupid, buggy that browser that people that are using it are stupid just because a couple of security issues!!!!!!!!
Not because Firefox is the standard and Microsoft is just making its own standards out of its minds trying to imply them on people's lives!
By the way, those Microsoft .net club committee members and students that were blinded by Microsoft were clapping each and every 5 minutes just to make people clap for the speaker on his silly jokes, drag and drops, and WOW-y actions..... DUH!
I Worked with Microsoft, It was a pleasure and a very nice experience, but .... why is this un-ethical stupidness acted by some of those guys!!! I clapped only when there was a reason to do it (example: the Vista session speaker wanting to show IE 7 opening google.com ;P )
Further more, during the Vista session, that was introduced proudly with: “Who still uses less than 1G RAM on his home PC”... talking about IE 7, tabs were made to be a (New Cool Stuff) that Firefox's tabs are old fashion, forgetting the fact that the tabs fashion was born long long time ago in Netscape and the fact that the guys at Microsoft took over 4 years to understand the tabs code from the open sourced Netscape in order to implement it and be the LAST web-browser on planet earth to implement it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And of course totally wrongly describing RSS, without forgetting the claim that IE 7 is the master of RSS!! of course, IE 7 couldnt resist that much when it simply broke down when clicking the RSS feed icon, where it simply entered the feed's xml file instead of bookmarking the feed just like IE 6, this is when the speaker said that if this was IE 6 it would have been XML code appearing, ignoring the fact that most the XML RSS feeds on the web are decorated with XSL transforms just in order not to appear in an XML tagged structure!
Epically that the experiment was don't on engadget.com, which was also introduced as (one of the famous companies) instead of a BLOG!
Of course there were many “stuff” in Vista's session that i don't wanna mention, nagging to buy it and buy a hardware that has 2-3G of RAM and 256M VGA cards!!!!!
The Microsoft blinded kidos of course got amazed with Vista while I'm still satisfied with running a 3D that they will never face as far as they will keep blinding their self with Microsoft Technologies with Looking Glass running on my 4 years old machine powered by 1999 Megas of Processor speed, hubbling and bubbling with its 384M SD-RAMs and a loudy built-in intel VGA.
The Best speaker was, no doubt, the Jordanian Story of Success, khaireddin Bushnaq, a Direct X developer that has really rocked the event, away from the usual business application stuff, and showing us a trailer of the 3D Petra project he's working on...... He was the best person that i gave away my hardest claps to, and it wasn't only me of course ;)
YOU ROCK MAN!
Eh, so ..... where is the problem ... why is this still going on more and more ...!
I've always considered the problem in Microsoft's technologies in the Jordanian IT community the Mass out of Microsoft technologies' developers, more particularly those introducing the technologies, certified center trainers, and students thinking .net technology instead of information technology where .net is considered a choice of a development platform and tool set.
And Yeah,,, this turn to use a technology to think off instead of information technology made this lack of ethics available and spreading more and more....
Are those at Microsoft liking it, maybe, and apparently they are in away or another, they are considering it an investment maybe, but its worth mentioning that the best Microsoft technology freaks are actually all-kinda-technology developers not Microsofto-mono-logy developers, people with ethics not just hand clappers!