MNteractive

I just got back from a week in Vegas attending the Microsoft Devconnections conference. Vegas. Fun. Microsoft Convention. Yawn.

But, I went, and feel obligated to report SOMETHING…

For starters, Vegas appears to the single best place on earth to open up a usability testing lab. I can’t think of a place more diversely homogenous (if that makes any sense…). It appears that you could walk out onto the strip, grab any 6 people, and right there have the full range of human beings found on the planet. Fat, skinny, smart, gullible, savvy, ugly, beautiful, tall, short, and in every shade of color out there.

And the best part? You really wouldn’t need to pay them anything. Just offer them half price tickets to Carrot Top and you’re good to go. Yes, you’d have to compete with the time share folks, but just cut your testing time by a half hour and you’ll have the upper hand.

Another benefit of having your testing lab in Vegas is people walking in will have a clean palet. I know that sounds odd, but in a way, Vegas will completely ’sterilize’ them to any notions of how anything should be. Vegas is so over-the-top absurd that it pretty much wipes the mind clean of any preconceived idea of what good design is.

So, there’s my sales pitch for some prime usability testing real estate.

On to the conference…

I honestly don’t have much to report. Mainly for two reasons: There wasn’t a whole lot of broad-interest things to report about and, well, people really aren’t THAT interested in Sharepoint news.

That said, I’ll sum up the conference for those that are interested:

• Microsoft REALLY likes AJAX. Atlas is close to being finished up and MS is really pitching it. In fact, 90% of the ASP.net 2.0 sessions were focused on AJAX. To be fair, it appears that MS has done wonders with Atlas. For once, they are literal and honest when they say you can ‘ajaxify’ your site with merely a few drag and drops. Unfortunately, it seems that most people at MS believe that AJAX’s sole purpose is to ‘prevent that annoying flicker when the page reloads’
• Sharepoint ‘07 is only half as evil as the current version. We’re moving to Sharepoint here at work. I’ve been dreading it. It looks like a nightmare. I must say, however, that ‘07 doesn’t look that awful. At least not as bad as any other commercial CMS I’ve looked at. Yes, there’s still a lot of overhead, but they have done some nice things. The CMS portion of sharepoint is much improved. The templating/branding elements are much easier to maintain. They’re embracing community tools like WIKI integration and the like. And it’s all ASP.net 2.0, so you can work directly with ASP.net.
• Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Want to maintain Sharepoint? Well, get VS.net ‘07. And pick up Sharepoint Designer. And you’ll probably want MS Expression as well. Using ASP.net? Upgrade to the Team suite. Oh, and of course you’ll want to be running the new SQL. And you might as well grab Vista while you’re at it, right? Well, nothing surprising there, I guess.

And, finally, one last item that I just found odd. During the keynote, they brought up a web designer from a team to present their site and how ‘cool’ it was. Just like they did in the days of the dot-com bubble conference era. Turns out, the person was from Burton. Huh. Burton…just like the snowboard company! Odd that Burton would let a ASP.net dev shop use the same name.

Well, surprise, surprise, it’s actually Burton…the ‘cool’ snowboarding company. That was the first oddity (what, a hip x-sports gen-x product company has decided to be a MS shop?) but the bigger oddity was this:

Yep. That’s a custom designed, AJAX-themed, ASP.net snowboard that they gave away at the conference. Hand signed by Jake Burton himself. As well as Bill Gates. Is that cool? Or dorky beyond belief? I can’t really tell.