I am not a developer; something I'm often at pains to point out. Sure, I understand the benefits of the .Net f/w, IDEs such as Visual Studio and have been involved with application architecture design on projects in the past. I've spent a lot of my time thinking about and presenting on SaaS for the last 9 months, inevitably I’ve learnt about Web 2.0 as a result. However most of this dev knowledge is on a theoretical level; sufficiently detailed for me to bridge the gap between application design/development, infrastructure and operations. Perhaps “sufficiently un-detailed” would be a better statement..

With this background, I’m quite interested in Popfly: the new Microsoft site/tool combo which makes it “easy to build and share mash-ups, gadgets and Web pages using pre-built “Blocks” that connect to online services” according to the blurb. The bit which is most appealing to me is the pre-built blocks; I’m kind of thinking drag-n-drop mashup.

I have an MSN Spaces site which details my rock climbing exploits that could benefit from being mashed up with things like Virtual Earth to show where I was climbing. I’ve long wanted an easy non-code way of doing this; Popfly may go far enough to stop me saying "I'm not a developer" (tongue firmly in cheek). I'm reminded of the time when GUI-based drag-n-drop products were released to enable business people construct complex SQL queries: these met with some success but produced horribly expensive SQL queries. Mind you, Web 2.0 and AJAX are a far cry from SQL queries..

I'm not sure I want to be known as a masher-up-er though.