Thursday, January 25, 2007
#
Yesterday's Israel Visual C# Users Group meeting at Microsoft, Ra'anana featured a lecture from guest speaker Tomer Shamam and he gave a talk about Windows Presentation Foundation.
The meeting was a mess. Here are some highlights to show why I left yesterday's meeting disappointed:
- The invitation for the meeting said it'll start at 17:00. When we got there, we were told the lecture will only begin at 17:30. MS brought in pizzas for us while we waited - thanks for that!
- The lecture did not actually start at 17:30. It was delayed for a further 15 minutes because it took Tomer ages to boot his laptop.
- The lecture wasn't well structured. It was based on a PowerPoint introduction that was intended for a much longer session. Tomer skipped many slides and it was difficult to keep track of how things progressed.
- WPF demos did not work very well. One attractive feature - embedding video into a button control - failed because Tomer's laptop wasn't powerful enough for it.
To balance things a bit let me say that Tomer definitely knows his WPF and I've learned quite a bit from yesterday's lecture. But the points above require significant improvements on behalf of both IVCUG and Tomer himself.
I just tried to register with Google Checkout - Google's shiny new payment service. To my surprise, I could not find my beloved country of Israel in the countries drop down list.
Turns out Google Checkout is only available in a few, select, countries. I learned this and little more in a support article buried deep inside the site.
Why isn't Google Checkout available in Israel and so many other countries? Google isn't saying.
Until then - Bad service Google dudes!