Tafiti and Microsoft

gregory house

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Tried using the Tafiti search engine (tafiti). It is still in beta. Plain tafiti.com is not redirected to the www subdomain. Big mistake. It asks for a password instead.

The website looks nice but is barely functional. Microsoft is using something called Silverlight (proposed flash-killer based on Windows Presentation Foundation/ .net 3/3.5) to provide the UI for the engine.The scroll bar does not respond to the mouse wheel.

Even now, I hate flash heavy websites. As far as I am concerned, well laid out text + appropriate amount of images = good website.

I don't know if people are going to take kindly to Windows Presentation Foundation. I definitely don't think traditional software developers are going to do that. It is one more headache. Here he is trying to make his application run and suddenly the client comes and says - "That customer search thing, could you make it like tafiti, you see with the swirling thing on the bottom left and drag-and-drop and..." Aargh! Hell, even now people are using Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft Access 97 to write their data driven applications, and Microsoft shows us Tafiti! It is back to the dark ages of I know not what am doing.

Frontpage and Dreamweaver gave rise to the html-illiterate web programmer (some people did graduate to learning the stuff). Now tools are available that will convert C# code to XAML. What rubbish!
 
umm the engine is just being used to showcase their silverlight technology so that developers can see the possibilities of it wrt adobe flash. microsoft at the moment has no plans to use tafiti commercially.:)
 
MS has a BIG chance here... they Excel at IDEs.Web does not have answer to VB+Oracle (yet). Flash is good, but its is not tied that nicely to IDEs, though Adobe is trying to get there with FLEX.If MS can come up with a IDS that lets you generate backend .NET + Silverlight Frontend for Oracle/SQL Server DBs, then creating basic web app can be as simple as writing VB front end for a DB.
 
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