Microsoft at AJAXWorld

by Peter Galli on October 20, 2008 05:05pm

The AJAXWorld Conference and Expo  got underway in San Jose today, under the broad theme of "Rich Web Technologies for Enterprise Web 2.0 & Social Web."

Scott Guthrie, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, delivered the keynote address today, while Brad Abrams, the Product Unit Manager for the AppFx team here at Microsoft, will also be presenting a couple of sessions over the next few days.

While Microsoft is not announcing anything new at the show, Abrams will point to the cumulative effect of all the work that has been done so far. He will talk about how JQuery will ship with future versions of Visual Studio, as well as how standards based JavaScript, CSS, and HTML are all now supported in Visual Studio 2008.

Attendees will also get to see how JQuery interoperability and usage is now on the same page with ASP.NET Ajax, as well as demos of the cross-browser, cross-platform Silverlight plug-in, which works on Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, and on both Macs and Windows machines.

Abrams tells me he also plans to show off a couple of Silverlight sites running on Linux with the Novell Moonlight implementation of Silverlight, as well as a demo of its Silverlight tools for Eclipse, which underscores how developers can use the tools they want to leverage Silverlight.

He has also posted a lot more detail on his talk, which was titled "Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch," in this blog post.

Also, Bryan Kirschner of the platform strategy group, will be delivering a keynote address on how Microsoft participates in a world of choice at GOSCON, the Government Open Source Conference, in Portland tomorrow.

In addition, two other colleagues from Microsoft will also be participating. Stuart McKee, the National Technology Office for the U.S., will be on the Government Open Collaboratives Panel with Brian, and Kathleen Connor from Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, will also be speaking.