This was my first MVP Summit and it was definitely interesting. Besides meeting other MVPs and Microsoft officials, like various product groups, evangelists and community managers, new products and ideas have been presented. Additionally I could spent some time on valuable discussions about current and future features of certain products.
Since I cannot write about most of the really interesting content, I will focus in this post on two other things: The Mobile World Congress, which has been scheduled nearly parallel to the global summit, and a future upcoming GUI framework called HtmlSharp (working title).
The Mobile World Congress (MWC) has been held in Barcelona, Spain. Intel invited the Sumerics team to present our software at the Intel Developer Zone (IDZ) booth. Since I've been in the USA during the MWC, my development partner had to fly to Spain. After some days of advertising Sumerics, his conclusion is that the MWC was indeed a success from the perspective of Sumerics. The overall reception was quite good and he could present the product to a lot of curious people.
At the MVP Summit I presented my idea of another GUI framework based on a HTML parser / rendering engine, written in C#. The whole approach aims to be platform independent with C# as core language, HTML5 / CSS3 as UI description / styling language. There are some good reasons, why I think such an approach would be beneficial. First of all, even with no implementation of the platform wrapper of HtmlSharp or C#, the whole UI could be ported easily. Since there are a lot of transpilers, C# could be converted to JavaScript, resulting in a conversion of a real program to a static (i.e. only client-side dynamics) webpage with no effort. If there is a platform wrapper (currently planned for Windows, Windows store (includes Windows Phone), Mono (Linux, MacOSX), MonoTouch, MonoDroid), then porting could be done with no effort. This means that the best of both worlds can be kept: The static typing, performance and elegance of C# with the portability, expressiveness and design options of HTML. The days that webdesigners and application designers have been required are then definitely over.
The project is currently in the design phase and the reception has been enormous. Let's see where this is going!