the case against .NET

Spent the day at this Carson Workshops Summit, along with four colleagues from Eurotherm.

With high profile speakers such as Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails fame and others, this was always going to be a worthwhile event. For an excellent account, see Jeremy Keith’s blog entries (starting here). Jeremy’s ability to blog in real-time, and in detail, is a real phenomenon.

Those with digital cameras were encouraged to use a common tag, futureofwebapps, when uploading to Flickr. I especially like Larsz’s MindManager maps.

Lessons learned? I wasn’t surprised by too much that I heard, though the strong emphasis from several speakers on having clean URLs gave food for thought. These must never change, and should reflect the site structure without being dictated by the implementation technology. In other words, use mod_rewrite to eliminate the .php or .html extensions. The strong presentation from Adobe of their Flex product was also unexpected.

With 800 delegates, some logistical slip-ups might have been anticipated - would the queues clear in time for the start, would the Wi-fi hold out? Actually, I don’t think there were any significant problems. Overall, thanks and congratulations to Carson Workshops for a very good day.