Last week I attended the conference mentioned in the title and I even hosted a session as a speaker together with Wim Verhaeghen. The topic we’ve been talking about for 75 minutes was Windows Mobile 5.0: features and functionality.

Getting there was tough. Tough because I spend a lot of time abroad, flying between Belgium and Sweden, and Wim is -very very- busy managing the local version of MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.be). All in all we managed to see each other around 4 times before the actual event. He doing a part of the presentation, me doing a part of the presentation, combining our efforts into one slide deck, making sure the language used is all of the same ‘tone’, etc. etc. Difficult to say the least.

But we managed.

The event came. It was my first Microsoft event. Until know I’ve been only to IBM related events (and way way way back I attended a few Sybase events). I was curious. Does it compare? Is there a difference in the audience?

Simply said: no. We’re all the same. It’s just a different tool we’re working with. That’s what I hoped to find, and fortunately it did turn out that way.

On stage I clearly mentioned that during the day I mostly work with IBM related software. I expected a few cough’s to say the least, but nothing. I walked around, talking to people, and none, I repeat, none of them made any remark regarding that. Try that on Lotusphere…

I’ve seen interesting things. ASP.NET is cool. If you’re working with Domino during the day, and not touch anything else but the Domino Designer, please, please, have a look out there. Check out ASP.NET, but also check out JSP. Its different, and in my opinion, so much better.

Domino is forcing us to work in an application ’setup’, a ‘development framework’, that at the time of its release was just brilliant. There was nothing that could compete with that at the time. The thing is however, demands changed, technology changed. Domino just got more stable…

Of course, Domino changed too, we got some nice features like webservices, etc. But the overal model of developing an application (let’s simply call it the webqueryopen/webquerysave model) did not change. That model these days is more stopping me from doing great things than that it’s helping me. The applications I’m creating require more interaction with the back-end application logic than I can (easily) do with Domino. Of course, you can do -everything- with Domino. But that’s maybe also its problem. Domino is a generalist. Generalists can’t be specialists…

Don’t get me wrong. I still very much like Domino. I’ve been a happy Domino developer since release 4.5, but in my mind, its place in the overal architecture is changing. Where it used to be at the front end, if it would be up to me I would move it to the backend. I still like its database model. Its replication technology, its clustering solutions, etc. etc. But for the frontend? As an real web application server running the actual frontend? No. There are better solutions for that these days. And I’m not only talking about ASP.NET right now. JSP does that job fine too.

As I said before: demands changed, technology changed, but in my humble opinion the only thing that happened to Domino was that it only became more stable.