Lazycoder

Microsoft research vs. IBM Alphaworks

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

I looked around the Microsoft research site today during my lunch. I was inspired to after going back to the IBM Alphaworks site (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/).

The Alphaworks stuff is a LOT more interesting to me than the Microsoft stuff. Plus they have RSS feeds for new releases. Yeah a lot of them are targeted for a platform that I’m not using at work, but the concepts are solid enough that I can read up on them, study the code, and think about how I would implement it using .NET.

Look at the Socializer. It’s a location based P2P collaboration client. A tool like this would be great for a team based environment. Right now it’s Win32 and WinCE based. Think about that, you can walk around your building with your WiFi enalbed PocketPC and autodiscover new peers, find out a little bit about them, chat with them, it makes trackback and current IM look like cave paintings.

IBM has an entire section dedicated to grid computing. I still haven’t seen anything come out of Microsoft related to grids except the datagrid (don’t get me started on that). I could be looking in the wrong places though, as you can imagine with the “datagrid” and “flexgrid” and “Scrolling grid” it’s hard to Google for “Grid C# .NET”. If anyone knows of any good (or bad) grid computing sites from Microsoft or for the .NET framework, drop me a line or a comment.

Their autonomic computing section is another hot button for me. I could spend a week in there looking over the projects. Check out ABLE – the Agent Building and Learning Environment

The most interesting projects I saw at the MS research labs were:

• Pastry – a P2P application substrate
• XBN – an XML based file format for sharing Bayesian network information.
• ASML – Abstract State Machine Language. Looks like a prototyping language for .NET

On another note. The IBM site is MUCH easier to navigate than the MS research site. I had just read about ASML this afternoon but I couldn’t find it when I got home until I looked in the downloads section(?).