Microsoft live labs projects

Several people are starting to blog about the introduction of the Volta project on live.labs.com.  This is a pretty interesting research project and points to an interesting development at Microsoft.  I get a little frustrated at times b/c I hear developers complain that a) Microsoft isn't agile enough and it takes them too long to release stuff, and b) there is too much stuff coming out of Microsoft for me to keep up.  Well which is it!

The stuff on live labs is really early stuff that is only interesting if you want to see what Microsoft is thinking about long term and provide feedback.  If you are going to get frustrated when you can't use this stuff in 6 months in production, then it is not for you.  That being said, looking at the list of projects out there, two really stick out for me: Volta and Deep Fish.  Volta is a really intesting project to me in that it potentially allows me to write client code once and have the framework take advantage of the richest platform on the client.  I think that is where it really shines, where I can create the UI and it will use Ajax on clients that don't have .NET, and use something richer like Silverlight 2.0 when it is there.  I think that is more compelling than figuring out architecture/deployment later on.  I watched a Channel 9 video a this summer about Volta: check out part 1 and part 2 to hear more about the ideas from

Jeff was just complaining about the fact that IE mobile has not evolved.  I look at the Deepfish project and it gives me hope that someday my Windows Mobile device will have a browser half as cool as the one on the IPhone.