VSLive! Keynote

I’m sitting in the keynote at VSLive! by Soma Somasegar (VP, Developer Division, Microsoft).

Interesting statistic: In February of 2002 there were 300 “.NET developer wanted” ads on monster.com, today there are over 10,000. Also interesting: in 2002 many of these ads wanted developers with 3+ years of .NET development experience. Gotta love the people that come up with those types of ads.

The Enterprise Library was plugged during the keynote, but the general thrust of the speech was to promote smart clients. I believe the success of Microsoft’s smart client push hinges entirely on ClickOnce. In my experience it’s often difficult to sell the CTOs and CIOs of the world on applications that requires IT to touch an end user’s machine. Many hold a religious like belief that browser applications are the solution to every problem, or they’ve been burned by deployment scenarios in the past. Microsoft will need to promote ClickOnce success stories to the execs more than the developers.

Yesterday was a travel day and was a little rough. Delayed flights - and I had nothing to eat the entire day. When I hit downtown San Fran I sank an entire fleet of small wooden sushi-carrying ships at restaurant called “Sushi Boat”. Yum.