Microsoft Opens "Channel" for Dialogue

[pricescope]

Microsoft Opens "Channel" for Dialogue:

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A team of Microsoft evangelists has unveiled an innovative new site, Channel 9, aimed at nurturing a dialogue with developers and evangelizing the software giant''s products. Site features include a blog, video, RSS feeds, wikis and forums.

The creators of Channel 9, at http://channel9.msdn.com, specifically disavow any marketing intention -- a line in the Channel 9 "doctrine" reads, "Marketing has no place on Channel 9." But it''s clearly an attempt to influence the company''s image in the developer community, embodying "marketing as dialogue" ethos championed in the influential book, "The Cluetrain Manifesto".
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[Nicrez]

OY! Next we'll have Microsoft Oat Squares for breakfast, and drink Microsoft Lemon Flavored Hydrating Fluid, in our Microsoft undies for men/women while watching MSNBC from our Microsoft Windows 3 Billion computer screen....

 

[strmrdr]

they want to reach develpers they can start by slashing the price on the dev. tools.
Hobby programmers/semi-pro. like me are priced right out of the market these days by the cost of the tools.
Which is why when I bother programming for fun its on linux and we dont get a lot of calls for it at work.

 

[limey]

...and how about development tools that make sense. We looked into converting over to PocketPC for our inventory/scanning applications but it is such a hodge-podge of versions and libraries all incompatible. So we stick to Palm for the handhelds and embedded circuits running Java to send data to our (free) web servers and JSP app server

... running on free Linux

 

[strmrdr]

andr3wpd,
Yep thats another thing.
Iv been looking into the .net api what a mess.
They had a chance to start from a clean slate and came up with an api thats just as nasty as the win32 api.
That doesnt look good for the so called simplified api that the next major overhaul of windows is spose to have.