As a Microsoft partner we've been invited to attend the 6th annual Microsoft financial services developer conference which took place in New York City last week.
It has been a great experience (about 900 people attended), and for us at GigaSpaces it was a huge success.
We presented two live demos:
- GigaSpaces Excel that Scales: Demonstrate Microsoft Excel as a rich client and GigaSpaces XAP which leverages an in-memory data grid to ensure fast access to critical data; co-locates data and business logic to maximize performance; offers automatic failover and high availability; scales linearly on commodity hardware. – Also known by the people who saw it "Excel on steroids".
"This solution will be applicable to just about everyone who is using Excel and has a data challenge, because the trends in escalation of data volumes and complexity of algorithms used to do calculations is not reversible." as Stevan Vidich, an industry architect for Microsoft Financial Services, is quoted in the Live by Excel, Die by Excel article in Gridtoday.
- GigaSpaces WCCS (Windows Compute Cluster): Demonstrate a winning combination of Excel, GigaSpaces and Microsoft HPC solution.
This was by far the best event I have ever attended; it was very focused, with a wide attendance of decision makers and developers that understand and know their current solutions' limitations and are looking for new and creative ways to rise above those limitations.
The GigaSpaces booth was the most crowded one there and the demos attracted many new prospects (there was even an actual prince among them – GigaSpaces is getting majestic!). The demos were so good that even Microsoft's sales people asked us to install our demo on their personal machines.
But the best of all was the "Gigarita", the scale-out margarita that was served during the cocktail hour, everyone loved it!
Look forward to seeing you there next year,
Alon
I confirm. It was and with me.
Microsoft said all it had to say in Silverlight Firestarter event back in December 2010. There, Microsoft made <a href="http://contactlenscoupon.org/">it</a> clear that it is aiming far higher than Adobe Flash; it is going for Adobe Shockwave/Director.
And now, Microsoft has spoken again: Silverlight 5 Beta is out!
So, as you see, Microsoft IS saying and it is very chatty. But (thankfully) Microsoft is not EA Games and Silverlight is not Command and Conquer: Tiberium Something.
And as for Windows 8, there is no need for Silverlight to come out of the browser; it is already out! Only out of the browser, it is called Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).