I went to a “Node Bootcamp” hosted by Microsoft yesterday. As I had expected, there was a lot of talk about Azure, which is ultimately where we were supposed to upload our projects. They spent the first part of the morning talking about Azure, and the later part showing how to write a simple Node app using Cloud9 (keep on eye on them). Then in the afternoon we were left to our own devices to create something in 3 hours with Node.
I was a little upset with the lack of assistance from the people hosting when it came time to code, but a few people had some pretty cool things built anyway, and with no prior experience. I guess that’s the beauty of Node; if you know Javascript, you’re already most of the way there, you just need to get familiar with how Node uses it.
I took the time to finally play with socket.io, opting to build a realtime chat tool (how original) and was really impressed with how easy it was to use. I couldn’t get it to run on Azure, I think because of connect-assets, but they let me demo my app on my local machine anyway. Then they judged what people had created and gave out some prizes for the ones they liked the most. My little socket.io chat thing earned me an HTC Surround!
I’ve been wanting to play with Windows Phone for a while but nobody I know has one. Recently, however, another friend of mine won one and I finally got to play with it. I was blow away with how responsive the interface was! But of course, it’s hard to judge a phone with only a couple minutes of handling it. Now that I have my own, I’m going to use it as my primary phone for a week or so and see how it goes.