Microsoft's dim future for web developers

Just for the record, this post is my bias opinion and in no way does it really confirm where Microsoft will be heading in the future with web developers.

I attended a small Microsoft (MS) seminar today hosted by two Microsoft engineers (whom we'll refer to them as 'MS guys') at my local college campus. The fact that Microsoft was in town to showcase their new products was just exciting for me to take the time to RSVP and see for my self what they might have to offer.

Now let’s get some personal facts out first. I'm a PHP/Coldfusion web developer with years of experience in backend web applications, since my early teen years, but I don't call myself an expert (yet). I've used ASP, Visual Basic, MS Office suite and continue to use many of Microsoft's other products.

In today's seminar, I was re-introduced to Visual Web Developer (VWD) Express with a live demo. If you're not familiar with Visual Web Developer, it's simply another Integrated Development Environment (IDE) by Microsoft only catered to web developers. This new application packs many ASP.Net features with support for DotNetNuke, a built-in webserver & SQL database migration, and most importantly a so-called "friendly and easy" to use web development environment where making websites should be fun.

Now, as a PHP web developer, I personally believe Microsoft needs a year or two to grab web designers and web developer’s attention to this kind of product. Unlike PHP which has come a long way from being a personal homepage tool language to a full blown dependable and understandable web programming language. I think ASP.Net has a great following crowd and I support their choice and cause for developing in ASP language. Although MS new Visual Web Developer may gain some ground, I see this application to hit rock bottom in the future as ASP becomes too dependable on Microsoft inter-connected products.

From start to finish, I was rarely impressed, except the fact that VWD uses very nice XML based configuration files, which is how far I got interested. As one of the engineers went on to demonstrate the Visual Web Developer, my friend noticed the Microsoft guy to be reading off pages from a book, as if he had no training or professional experience before hand. I understand this was a quick draft presentation, but if Microsoft really wanted to grab me by my feet with excitement, they should consider sending a well knowledgeable and professional web developer. I noticed that VWD had no consideration for web designers and lacked many web development tools and WYSIWYG interface unlike Macromedia's Dreamweaver product. It had too many useless tools and features that only served to their IE browser.

To conclude this thought, I believe that MS does not have web developers in mind as it should have. I think my friend and I had more fun poking at VWD's weak IDE interface. Just to state that the MS guys spend 20 minutes of their 40 minute presentation just trying to show us how to use basic SQL queries to output something very simple as a blog. With PHP this would have taken less time, in my opinion.