Today and tomorrow the game and engine programming group is attending a course on mobile platforms - and their game programming abilities. Today we wrote WAP pages - and ... heard of the wonders of microsoft's .net platform. We even had a guy from microsoft with the official title of "Academic Developer Evangelist" come to talk about .net. I mean, come on! Evangelist! Who makes up these titles? I might as well call him the devils advocate.

He talked "marketing'y" about all the wonderful .net technologies and frameworks that microsoft brought to the market to help developers. Everything would be great when all platforms from mobile to large servers could run the same software. What he actually meant was:

Everything would be great when all microsoft platforms from windows mobile to large windows servers could run the same .net software.

And then he started coding in C# and showing us a beta version of visual studio .net 2005 (everything microsoft is apparently called .net these days, at least they've settled on a decent version numbering scheme - i guess it became kinda silly keep increasing the major version number all the time when you don't add new features - so now you're just paying for 2 years of bug-fixes).

Well back to the development story - the guy showed how to drag four controls into a form to create a web-browser - apparently this was something new and exciting on the microsoft platform, although i never really understood why. He wrote a bit of code (he couldn't code worth shit - yeah i'm judging on seeing him write 15 lines of C# code) and he deployed it to the phone - something we should be impressed about here is that it's called deploy rather than run - and that visual studio .net 2005 can transfer programs to an PDA - this is apparently also new in the microsoft platform - one wonders how they manage to convince people that they're innovative. He tried running the program on an included emultator and the windows froze! I mean come on - it's ok for a program to crash when it's in a beta version - and still needs some work - but he couldn't get to the Task Manager to kill the process - had he to just cut the power to his laptop to get it back working! I mean come on! If a users program can crash the operating system, who in their right mind would then use this OS for any important work! Sys. Admin.: Yeah, well i'm sorry our company's web-page was offline for a week Company CEO: Well why did this happen! We paid 10.000� for windows server products! Sys. Admin.: Well minesweeper crashed while i was pretending to work down in the server room - and it took the whole server down with it.

Who should the CEO plame now?

Ok, enough ranting - he just wasn't any evangelist - he was brain-washed.

And people call the church of emacs guys crazy! http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/

Behold the awesome Saint IGNUcius! And no he is not the microsoft guy!

On a related note Bill Gates has threatened Denmark's primeminister with laying off 800 jobs if Denmark opposes software patents in the EU http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050215071109231 - well thanks to Poland we have now gotten that directive directly back to the commision (please note that i'm 10 days behind on my slashdot.org reading so things might have changed).