I like jQuery + Microsoft

I like jQuery. I really do. And I use it all the time. I've had to try some pretty out there Firefox/OSS lovers software to get a good IDE intellisense experience with it. Although its a simple library, I've become spoilt with Visual Studio. There are so many frameworks out there, that to stop the nose bleeds I've started to revert to the yeoman old developer trap of "if it isn't in VS it doesn't exist"

Well hoorah, because according to ScottGu's blog, http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/09/28/jquery-and-microsoft.aspx we can now expect jQuery to be included by default with VS and the ASP.NET AJAX library.

This is fantastic news, and another great step forward in seeing Microsoft's best of breed development tools be right where they should be as far as the support of JS libraries is concerned; I won't be surprised if we see jQuery either ship in IE8, or be hosted on something nice and blazing vast (pos. with a cache in IE8?) so that all the goodness we developers write in the coming months will run really fast.

Windows Live Writer - Killer for the first time

I run several blogs, some for myself on my own domain, but the blog which I blog most too is my companies internal developer blog which I setup internally affectionately known as The Cooler.

I blog to Word Press and blogger mainly, but have tried out a couple of different spaces.

Now with so many blogs that I write too, it makes sense to use a Blog Writing package. I haven't tried out others, but Microsoft Live Writer, from the Live boys over at MS is simply kick ass.... its the perfect example of a web enabled Windows application.

It's extensible, coming with its own SDK for the development of Insert plug ins, all of which are super functional and make the creation of a good blog post awesome.

What for me is great is the automatic style sheeting, so you have a fairly true WYSIWYG process, far better than Office 2007's Word blogging tool : I hope Live Writer's features will eventually be embedded in Word, but I understand the software stacks for these two applications are truly different.

What is so awesome, is that despite punting Windows Live Spaces, Live Writer interacts so well with so many different blog platform providers. This is the kind of innovation I love about MS but which so rarely makes its way into their consumer products.

Anyone who has used Visual Studio in the last couple of years knows all about the extensible and web enabled nature of MS's application direction, but to see this kind of functionality in a free blog writer is truly excellent.

I find the software best of breed and  a joy to work with, especially when it comes to uploading, managing video and images on your site. The ability to to work effectively with multimedia in a blog writer with all the power of the native Windows OS is the first real sign that MS really 'gets it' when it comes to rich Internet enabled applications for the desktop.

The application is super fast, and a lot could be learned from it. It's so good it makes me feel a little open source evangelical: I'd kill to see the source of this great little application, but then so would Google and other Microsoft competitors.

It's such an exciting time for Internet enabled desktop applications, and with products like Windows Live Writer coming from Microsoft, it would seem MS is fully on board with this wave.

One of the awesome plug-ins allows you to quickly add a map, such as the one below of the South African parliament:

Google / Yahoo / Microsoft : The Square Off

So... Microsoft offers billions for Yahoo!, and Eric Schmidt promptly offers Yahoo! help (even financial) to help them stave off their sale to Microsoft.

Why? Google dominates search and online advertising, and the merger would see tremendous difficulties reconciling the cultures and technologies of the two entities.

Some say Google just wants to see the price go higher. This may be true, but I think there is something deeper in this as well, and that is the culture clash between Redmond and Silicon Valley.

By buying Yahoo!, MS would be buying a major slice of the Valley, and therefore literally turf in the battle for skills, talent and exposure down South. I wouldn't be surprised to see Yahoo! becoming de facto MS South for a while, as the company figures out how to combine the two companies.

Google has more to lose than the beating their stock is receiving. Google could lose the battle for the services orientated world that is coming. They won't to control the cloud, but as search matures and becomes a less disruptive class of functionality, and as others copy their other businesses, Google will struggle to keep the financials they have managed to deliver to Wall Street thus far.

MS have proven themselves masters at perfecting what others have done before them. Will advertising and search be no different to Server OSs, GUIs, etc? I wonder, and deep down inside... I hope so!

Because a big Google, is just as bad as a big Microsoft!