March 3, 2010
I had a fantastic time presenting at the second edition of the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta. The topic I tackled was "Microsoft Technologies in a Google World." The session had a good turnout -- somewhere around 50 folks, and the audience was energized. There was some amount of feigned outrage that I was giving a Microsoft presentation on a MacBook Pro (all the code demos were on a Win 7 virtual machine). That provided a good ice breaker, though, as folks offered me stickers to cover up the glowing Apple on the back of my machine. I declined. However, I told the crowd that if projector failed me (it was having overheating problems), the first person who shouted "I hate Macs" would get one of my giveaways.
The gist of the presentation was that there are literally hundreds of Google products, with more appearing all the time. Some of them have developer APIs, and some of the APIs are very powerful.
It's easy to believe that in order to play in Google's sandbox, you have to write Python or Java or JavaScript. I set out to show that was not the case. There has been a lot of work done by the community -- and even Google itself -- to write .NET-oriented components and APIs. In addition, Microsoft offers technologies like the REST Starter Kit and LINQ to XML that make it a joy to develop on the open standards that Google generally favors.
The slides from the presentation can be viewed here: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddp5xc2n_198dxwphpdz
Some of the other links from the presentation include:
Section about Google Maps (Demonstrating an API that is straightforward to use with .NET):
- General Google Maps API landing page: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/
- Google Maps .NET component: http://en.googlemaps.subgurim.net/
Section about Google Wave Robot (Demonstrating an API that is difficult to use with .NET)
- API landing page for Google Wave Robots: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/robots/index.html
- API landing page for Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/
- Jon Skeet Facts: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts
- API landing page for Wave Robot .NET Client: http://code.google.com/p/wave-robot-net-client/wiki/GettingStarted
Section about the Google Data API (Demonstrating an open-standards API that you can build upon)
- Google Data API page: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/
- Google Data 3.0 Atom Protocol: http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/developers_guide_protocol.html
- WCF REST Starter Kit: http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/wcf-rest/
