Me and most of the London tech collective attended the Future of Web Apps conference in a cold and desolate part of docklands this week. I’m going to post a series of thoughts on it over the next week or so.

On the way from crappy hotel to Excel on Friday morning, I shared a bacon sandwich with a guy from Microsoft. They had a booth in the corner of the expo floor with some 360s, a Microsoft Surface table (underwhelming, over-expensive) and some marketing guff about Expression Web, Visual Studio and other bits and bobs. Not a peep about asp.net anywhere to be seen.

He told me that Microsoft came to these events now because they want to be more associated with the web2.0 crowd that attends these shindigs. Working for a Microsoft-driven house, I thought this was interesting, so as we shared the ketchup I picked his brains on a few bits and pieces.

Firstly we talked about Apple evangelism, a bit about the upcoming fall dashboard release for the XBox 360, and we ended up having a long chat about .net and it’s perceived shortcomings in relation to rails, php and other ‘groovier’ frameworks that are evangelised among big tech communities.

I said that MSDN is all well and good for achieving its goals, but compared to php and rails in particular, there is no decent community around asp.net. He readily agreed with me, and I told him that really since they’re the only true commercial framework, it’s their responsibility to nurture a grassroots community of .net evangelists and to help properly showcase some of the good work that’s being done with web apps using MS technology, beyond their shitty PR-heavy press releases.

He totally agreed with me. Hiring .net developers is a great deal trickier than finding a php fanboy. Comparatively, they’re concealed behind a wall of underinformed recruitment consultants and don’t contribute to the same kind of projects as their open source brethren.

They need to sort that out. Let’s hope they do.

More FOWA posts on the way.