The panel at the Ajax Experience Conference

Thanks to the Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (and my fellow panelist) for having me on panel last night. I had a great time and continued to learn a ton! For those of you that were not there, I captured a few of the questions that stood out to me...

- Are we at an infliction point in application development?

Absolutely... The rising tide of expectations users have for the experience they should have in their applications is only going to increase. This will force the Ajax (and general application development community) to get even more creative in finding ways to meet those needs. There is no question in my mind that the most successful applications for hence forth will offer the very engaging user experiences.

- Accessibility

Yes, it is a huge issue for applications generally and specifically for web apps. For broadly used apps it is important that we work hard to make them as broadly usable as possible. As a Ajax framework vendor, we are trying to do our part with Atlas by working toward making all mouse jesters accessible via the keyboard.. this not only makes apps more friendly to screenreading tools but it also generally makes them more usable. We have more work to do no doubt, but this is certainly on our radar.. Wally talks about this a bit from a while back.

- Jscript debugging in IE

The best debugger for IE is without a doubt the FREE Visual Studio Web Developer... I strongly suggest you get that and add it to your debugging arsenal. It is a full feature debugger (set breakpoints, step into, memory inspector, watch window, etc). In addition, Nikhil Kothari has a great Web Developer Helper add in for IE6\7 that helps you listen to http traffic, find the line number of script errors, DOM inspections, etc. Check it out.

More general IE\Atlas\VS2005 debugging tips

- WPF\E

There is lots of interest in WPF\E – the cross platform\cross browser subset of WPF+CLR.... runs on Mac, Windows, FireFox, IE, Safari. Here is a great talk we did recently on it.. I’ll be happy to bring more WPF\E content to next year’s event! Check out a recent presentation on WPF\E.

What did I miss? What else did you find interesting?