Oxford Brookes hosted one leg of the Microsoft Inspiration Tour today, where Ed Dunhill and Busted-lookalike Ben Coley sent out the marketing message to Brookes students about the latest MS tech: Silverlight, Popfly, Windows Embedded, XNA etc. I had to leave halfway to get to work, but it was very interesting.
Unfortunately there was nothing new for people who already follow Microsoft news and tech such as myself, and the demos I had all seen before. This is the second time I have sat through the Fantastic Four Silver Surfer trailer on the Silverlight Fox movies demo site at a Microsoft event. Interestingly they had to bring a Xenon 360 devkit in for the XNA demos since they couldn’t definitely get an Xbox Live connection at the events they visit - which is required to run XNA stuff on a retail box. The presentation was a tiny bit out of date, for instance Silverlight 1.1 is now 2.0.
Around 70 people had signed up for the event, but just about 30 turned up. This isn’t the fault of the marketing or the presentation itself (although Wheatley campus no doubt had something to do with it), but because simply Oxford Brookes is not a Microsoft shop. They mentioned that all the technology they were showing has one thing in common - the .NET Framework powers all of it. However, try finding a computer in the Brookes computer labs even capable of running a simple .NET Framework app (seemingly none of them have any version of the runtime installed). Furthermore, despite having excellent fully-functional versions of Visual Studio now available completely free as Express editons, these are not on lab computers and no C# or .NET content is taught on any Brookes courses that I know of. Introductory programming classes are still taught in Pascal using Delphi - leaving students scrabbling around to try and find a free version of Delphi 6 every year. Brookes isn’t allergic to .NET though (my final year project uses it extensively for ASP.NET and XNA) and will let you use it when a programming language isn’t specified.
Maybe Microsoft should be giving an “Inspiration Tour” to the lecturers at the university instead, they could call it “Teach your students something relevant! Tour”. When the question “Who has heard of the .NET Framework?” was asked, 5 people put their hands up out of 30. These are meant to be computing students with an interest in technology - even my friend who is an Apple disciple knows about .NET.
