Rubicon

I have used MFC/ATL to some extent in the past. Granted it is not the easiest of the technologies, it was challenging to develop in these frameworks. VC++ 6 was a great IDE for the times. Thereafter VC++ seems to have taken a back seat. MFC is showing its age and ATL is too complicated for a lot of new people coming on board. But there was no investments in these fields from MS and so I had to embrace .NET What amazes me is that Apple has successfully created an awesome platform using Objective C (ugly language) and has made some Java programmers to grudgingly switch to Objective C to hop onto the Apps bandwagon. How come MS has not been able to do this? Granted Objective-C and C++ is not apples to apples comparison. But my take is that if platform & tools (also some form of a channel to monetize your IP) were compelling enough, Developers would build rich apps irrespective of the language. Everything supported in .NET does not have to be supported in C++ (Managed C++ was an effort that did not create anything significant). I hope to see some revival of VC++ in its own right - not as another language for the .NET platform.

If there is a possibility iIt would be nice if MS opens this stack as an open source project.  AFAIK there is no good  open source native web services API. The community will benefit greatly.

Just curious what kind of work Miha Kralj does. No offence but want to be enlightened. Listening to his comments made me wonder what role Architects play in Microsoft. Are they purely business focussed without a technological foundation? If so, what is the role of the people that come up with specifications like SOAP, WCF Binary protocols, SMB etc.

Hi,
  I would like to watch some of these videos on my PSP while commuting. I see some videos on Channel9 to have the PSP format but not the PDC08 ones. Can anyone tell me how I can convert these videos to the PSP format?

Thanks.