MIX06 - Does This Change Everything?
Last week I was at the MIX06 conference in Vegas. I wanted to post my thoughts/comments on the conference.
A couple of areas of focus for the content at the show stuck out to me:
Web UE Guidance: I think as an industry we do a pretty bad job of building software that delivers a first-class user experience. We (in general) know how to build software that performs well and is reliable, but we don’t (in general) know how to build software that behaves the way people expect it to and delivers a user experience that is independent from the underlying services. It was great to see MS taking a leadership position on this. A couple of the sessions I attended on AJAX/Atlas and more generically on building great user experiences were very informative. I see a LOT of the theories on building great UEs applied to the image search results page on the Live search site.
Atlas: Atlas reminds me a LOT of ASP 1.0. At the time ASP came out there was no ‘easy’ framework/toolset for building Web apps. ASP changed that; for the first time it was easy (relatively speaking) to build a Web application. It looks like Atlas is poised to do same for AJAX, but the complexity bar will be a little higher. Like most/all things to come out of the ASP.NET team, Ajax looks to be a well thought-out framework with the promise of great tools support to make it easy to build on. I say ‘great promise’ for the tools because at the moment the framework is clearly ahead of the tools. You can build great apps with Atlas today, but it is going to be ‘harder’ than a lot of people would like.
WPF/WPFE: I came away from the conference with a solid understanding of WPF/WPFE in terms of the technology. What I’m still not entirely clear on is when/if this will be a relevant technology to a meaningful portion of the development community. From a skeptics point of view, MS is working hard to deliver something about a year from now that will be roughly the same as what you can get today with Flash. There is some truth to that point of view…especially in the context of WPFE. In truth, I do think that MS is doing some innovative work with WPF what does leapfrog what Flash offers today. The real value, however, comes from the deep integration of WPF and supporting technologies into the MS application development tools/runtime stack. I do believe that WPC will replace the current Windows forms runtime for building desktop applications. I also think you will see Web applications taking advantage of WPF, but I am less confident on this one. The big question here is when. Personally, I think it’s going to be a while before WPF becomes a relevant technology developers…if I had to guess I would say 3-4 years. It will take that long for the runtimes to become generally available, the tools support to be there, and the technology to mature.
Live Services: This was the area where I came away least interested/excited. I think MS has a good story with the services they are working on and the concept of ‘software as a service’, I just don’t think much of what they are building will be useful to a meaningful portion of the development community. I’m exited/interested to see what MS can deliver on top of these services, but I don’t think there is a big opportunity for developers outside of MS to integrate them.
Media Center: A bit off topic, but there was some amazing demos of the next version of Media Center. The product just keeps getting better and better with the Vista release. Once I can get HDTV content into the box over something other than an antenna (ideally via DirectTV, but digital cable will work as well…) I will be all over putting an MCE box in my living room!
All in all, it was a productive couple of days. The conference had a different feel than most big MS conferences. It felt less rehearsed/less like a 3 days marketing session which was a nice change of pace.
In the end, is Microsoft ‘changing the way we build apps’ with the announcements and information they shared at MIX – no. The messaging and direction they provided felt very consistent with their past messaging to me. Sure, there was more of an emphasis on Web UEs at MIX, but MS has always had a strong story when it comes to Web development so this was nothing ‘new’. It was great, however, to see MS taking a strong/leadership position on delivering compelling software over the Internet. There is definitely a perception that other companies are doing a better job of that (not JUST a perception...but largely one), so it was good t osee a compelling/cohesive story from MS in this area.