John Montgomery has a post entitled I’m Missing Something Here where he expresses similar sentiments to those expressed by Charles Fitzgerald in the C|Net article Will AJAX help Google Clean Up? on the increased hype around using DHTML and server callbacks (aka AJAX) for building web sites. Both senior Microsoft developer evangelists seemed to be saying "AJAX sucks, use .NET instead". Specifically

John Montgomery: "I’m not sure if AJAX is an amazing transformational technology, or simply the pinnacle of what you can do with Javascript. Nor am I sure that I wouldn’t have been better off writing a ClickOnce Windows Forms app for most of what I was doing."

Charles Fitzgerald: "It's a little depressing that developers are just now wrapping their heads around these things we shipped in the late 20th century. But XAML is in a whole other class. This other stuff is very kludgy, very hard to debug. We've seen some pretty impressive hacks, but if you look at what XAML starts to solve, it's a major, major step up."

The words attributed to Charles Fitzgerald are taken from a news article so they shouldn't be taken as verbatim statements though I assume that C|Net captured his sentiments accurately.

What the Microsoft evangelists are forgetting is that the Web is about reach. AJAX is about attempting to build rich internet applications while preserving the reach and zero deployment costs of the Web. It smacks of completely not understanding the problem space to suggest that sites like http://maps.google.com or http://www.start.com/myw3b should be using Winforms or XAML/Avalon instead of exploring AJAX.

I suspect it is a weird sort of tunnel vision. Spending so much time talking to developers building intranet applications makes some people believe that this is the same as web development. It isn't.


 

Sunday, 12 June 2005 22:40:09 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Charles and John probably think that people would have a better web experience if they ran Windows and could leverage Windows-based applications that are richer than browser-based apps- that's my take on their comments.
Monday, 13 June 2005 02:18:57 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Watch out Dare, the Microsoft koolaid squad will come get you and hold you under until you believe!
bobdole
Monday, 13 June 2005 03:33:29 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Yea...Dare, you need to drink some more Kool-Aid...

If 95% (+/- a few %) of the machines on the Internet run Windows, then Winforms or XAML/Avalon have pretty good reach as well. (Yes, I know all of those aren't running .NET...). And with A LOT less hassle and A LOT more functionality than a AJAX solution.
Monday, 13 June 2005 07:37:10 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
> I suspect it is a weird sort of tunnel vision. Spending so much time talking to developers building intranet applications makes some people believe that this is the same as web development.

And yet this cuts to the very heart of Microsoft's problem-- trying to serve two very different audiences with the same OS and applications.

For instance: why was IE hacked so much? Because it was totally open and programmable. And who wanted this? The enterprise business users. The home users could care less about this stuff, but they sure had to deal with the security fallout from it all.

And yet, XMLHTTP* wouldn't even exist without the force of all those enterprise "features" that get tacked on to every product and written about in every issue of MSDN magazine. It certainly wasn't a W3C standard, just something that Firefox eventually copied due to, I guess, clamor for that particular feature.

* World's worst name. What does this have to do with XML?
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