I read Brad Abram's blog and Silverlight is something I want to try. He recently blogged about a webcast introduction of Silverlight. I figured I'd watch it before I started playing around with it, at least it would give me some basis to work from.

Too bad the webcast is hosted by Microsoft.

First step forces you to log in with a passport account (the account you use for hotmail or msn messenger). The second step presents you with a form to register for the "event". However on the top of that screen it says if you don't want to submit this info you can press on cancel. I read that assuming the registration was optional and clicked cancel. I ended up at a screen giving details about the webcast and a button saying register online. I click the button and get the same form as before. I figured they were just going to spam me to fill it out every time I tried to go somewhere but let me through anyway so I clicked cancel again and ended up at the same page I was on before. So I clicked on the button again and filled in the form with bogus info like I usually do. (I live on Capitol Hill!) Then it gives me information about when it was recorded and basically all the same stuff as the page before. So I click lauch webcast or something of the sort. Then I end up at a livemeeting form that wants me to fill out a profile again. Great. More bogus info. Finally get through and what happens?

View And Download Recordings

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 with SP1 and above is required to view the recording in Live Meeting replay format.

All that for nothing. I'm not going to boot into windows and launch IE just to watch a 30 min video. Google lets me stream any of their TechEd videos immediately without a bazillion forms and it works on everything automatically. Sorry Microsoft but you fail at the web.

Epic fail.