Having spent the day in Micro$ofts tech ed conference having the M$ products pushed at you I felt a little like I had been to an Amway meeting. Mind you what did I expect it is the "microsoft" tech ed. Saw Vista in action in all its Beta1 glory and if it does all its sposed to I think Microsoft may have secured its OS market for the next few years. Security is really getting the going over in the OS.

This is something Macromedia have really tightened up on in the next release of the player and I wonder if anything was influencing this.

The biggest new for me really was the talks on "INDIGO". 

 Indigo is microsofts all in one answer to remoting, webserives, ajax etc. Basicallly they are building something of a bable fish for .Net to tie into many systems and data layers. I have just downloaded the beta and along with the supplied beta of VS 2005 I will have a little look into the possibility of writing a serialiser for flash comunication. Note only the possiblility….not actually do it. I have had a few issues with flash webservics and .Nets complex data strctures in webservices so Indigo might provide the answer for this.

 I personally think it would be a really good idea for Macromedia (no wait macrobe) to open up a bit of an SDK for the boys and girls on the Idigo team to create a translator for .Net. I realise this is what comunication server is for but in my eyes many enterprise level customers arent going to go for another server technology. And something like this could really open up the RIA market and give flash exposure to many enterprise customers. Because I cant tell you how many M$ data grids I have just torn my hair out over and whished I could just make them in flash. So much of the data displayed in .Net is just so boring ….flash could prove to be a big hit.

 Competing against CF could be a problem, but I dont so much see it as competition but more opening up access to other customers. CF has its place, and I cant really comment because I have really been down that track.

Finally  I cant wait to see where old bill takes vista, but Im glad to see that my company isnt the only one with sales people controling the naming of certain features. *remembers the incedent of hot folders becoming Service bureus WTF!!! Now all the new M$ features have new names and even the developers admit they dont understand them fully.