The MS folks at the Microsoft Mobile Platforms Division Partner Briefing are showing off Sidecar, a new technology that lets hardware manufacturers embed a small display and controller in the lid of a laptop. That way, you can get at some information — maps, appointments, music, etc. — without having to open up and boot from standby and so on. That would be really, really, really handy for mobile users like me.

Unfortunately, the Sideshow team isn't talking to the .NET team. The developer tools group have been pushing managed code (i.e., .NET) for pretty much everything; but Sidecar has only a C++/COM API. This, I find, is a consistent, recurring problem for Microsoft: some of their leading edge stuff in one area hasn't kept pace with some of their leading edge stuff in another area. The Speech API (SAPI), for example, is still only available as a really poor COM wrapper around a C++ core. When I hear MS haters scream how unfair it is that MS app developers have unfair access to the internals of MS platform code, I can only laugh: it seems like the market as a whole is much farther ahead in adopting MS technologies than are some parts of MS itself.