March 2008 - Posts
Today was the last day at Mix. As with many conferences, attendance is low and the content is not as high of caliber as the rest of the conference. I'll give some quick reviews of the sessions I attended and then some closing thoughts about the conference.
Bring Your Data to Life with Windows Presentation Foundation
This session didn't bring anything new to the table with respect to WPF. Anson Tsao recapped how WPF handles data binding and using templates. He did have an interesting demo that showed off using a 2d interfaces within a 3d application. He had two apps that were fully functional, but would rotate in and out primary focus based upon where the user's focus was.
Nerd + Art: Ten Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist
This presenation was given by Nathan Dunlap and Robby Ingebretsen from Idenity Mine. The goal of the talk was to give designers a few snippets of code that they could use to improve their user experiences The snippets are available here. It is a simple .vsi file that is geared mainly towards designers. The snippets would look pretty familiar to most developers, but it should hopefully empower designers to take a look behind their xaml to better leverage all of WPF and silverlight
Effective User Interfaces in Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight
This is the session that I will remember the most out of the entire conference. This is not because of the content, but because of the scary way in which it ended. it was delivered by a panel of engineers from Innotive The session began with some mildly interesting interesting lessons learned about designing for touch displays. The have built touch screen kiosks for Infiniti and have used the deep zoom technology to work with some large images. Some of the struggles they mentioned were trying to get people to use large touch screens. People see these large flat panel displays and don't readily understand they can touch them. In an interesting tidbit, they mentioned how they solved this by paying a college student to go and touch the display every few minutes. From this point, Peter Chang, Inntive's CTO took over to demo an app that didn't look quite ready. He stumbled through the presentation that had a few bugs. As he was presenting, he slumped forward and lost consciousness and hit the ground like a rag doll. People tried attending to him, but he was completely limp. It scared a lot of people in the session, including myself. I asked if anyone was a doctor. In retrospect, I should have known the answer to my own question... how many doctors would be attending this session. Peter regained consciousness and sat down on a chair on stage. After some encouragement, they brought him off stage and tended to him. It turns out Peter was working very hard on the presentation for the last 3 days. The talk pretty much wrapped up from there. They mentioned he was ok. He sure gave all that stayed around for the last session of the day a good scare. I'm glad he's ok.
Final thoughts
- Where's the new stuff????
When you compare the MIX to previous Mix's, there's really nothing new here... Silverlight 2.0? Yeah, we all like to have new controls and a better model for laying out apps, but this pales in comparison to last year's introduction of Silverlight 1.0.
- WIFI in hotel rooms is a joke
While there was free wifi at the conference, right after the last conference, we lost Internet connectivity. After heading back to the hotel room at the Venetian, I'm still surprised how hotels still find a way to charge $10/day for "high-speed" Internet that is hardly any faster than what I can get from a tethered phone. I'd love to see Hotels go the way that starbucks has with their wifi strategy. If I only want to browse a small amount to check email or check my RSS
feeds, give it to me for free. If I plan on using it as my office for the day, I'll be happy to pay for quality Internet.
I attended 3 pretty good sessions and the keynote with SteveB and Guy Kawasaki. I'll recap them below:
Building Great AJAX Applications from Scratch Using ASP.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008
This session felt like a recap session on some of the technologies the client-side AJAX support. I am constantly impressed by the javascript intellisense support that is avialble inpeople are already using in their day-to-day development. You can see his own recounting of the session here. He talked about Muti-targeting, CSS support and LINQ to SQL for data access. He next walked through a pretty simple example of using a server-side UpdatePanel to reduce screen flicker. The talk started getting interesting when he demo-ed VS 2008. Once great thing he pointed out is that if you don't have javascript enabled in IE, IE8 is now able to turn it on by itself when you're in a debugging experience. He finished the session by showing off the auto-complete textbox that is part of the AJAX toolkit. Always cool to see how cleanly these tools work, at least in a demo setting.
Keynote with Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer
The keynote was again preceded by our Johnny Cash impersonator. It turns out the kid was only 15... he could have fooled the majority of the audience that he was much older. During the talk, Steve talked about how much MS wants Yahoo. You get the impression that it is just a matter of time or stock price before the deal happens. Steve hinted at what would change if the merger would happen, pointing out that there is no need to have 2 searches, and 2 mail applications. He went on to talk about Apple. On one hand, he knocked Guy Kawasaki's macbook air and their model for charging 30 center on the dollar for apps on the iphone., but on the other hand, was very happy that Apple licensed ActiveSync. Lastly, Steve acknowledged that Vista created, and continues to create a bottleneck around other initiatives at Microsoft, perhaps explaining why IE has felt a bit of competition from Firefox. Lastly, Steve got the crowd riled up with yet another monkey dance, chanting the greatness of web developers this time. Steve's comment about a 50 cent cut at the end of the rant was a funny jab at apple.
Social Networks: Where Are They Taking Us?
This was a good panel discussion with some people from Plaxo, Facebook, amongst others. I attended because Guy Kawasaki was again the moderator. The main thing I got out of the talk was the sense of one trusted online presense once has. The goal is to take the anonymity that people hide behind in the web away. One way they all agreed might help is pushing the OpenID spec along. It's sounds eerily similar MS's hailstorm, which has been around since the 90's.
Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Model View Controller (MVC) Pattern
This was probably one of the most entertaining sessions at Mix, delivered by Scott Hanselman. I like the way MVC sits on top of ASP.NET. It is structured in a way of take as much or as little of it as you like. Looking at it, I don't see it as the silver bullet for all development, but it seems to fit very nicely into the TDD workflow. If you're looking to get a application quickly to market, and like working with TDD, MVC seems to be the answer. If you're working in a corporate environment with a lot of custom controls or datagrids, sticking with raw ASP.NET might work better.
Keynote
Things got kicked off this in true Vegas fashion with an artist performing Johnny Cash songs.
Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie came on stage and spoke for a short time about Microsoft's vision for the web going forward. To sum things up, Microsoft sees the web as a hub that will connect all your devices together, from your PC to your zune, to your media center pc. Nothing new here in this message. One interesting technology that was puts the rubber to the road is SQL Data services. This is an interesting one. I'm curious to see how willing corporations will be to put their data outside their own hosted machines.
Scott Gu & Company
Scott Guthrie took the reigns over from Ray and began his 3 ring circus, not the least of which was his endearing juggling audition for cirque du soleil.
IE8
- Interop The number 1 point of IE8 was its dedication to interoperability. In a complete about face, IE8 will be standards-compliant right out of the box. They will be supporting CSS 2.1 by default and have been working with the WC3 to clear up the standards with 702 specific test cases they are supporting.
- Performance IE8 has improved upon IE7's script performance. I hope this turns into a real-world experience boost. I have my doubts that it will render HTML as quickly as currently Firefox does.
- HTML5 IE8 will support HTML 5, which includes some nice hash functionality that will hopefully not break that back button for AJAX-based web sties
- IE8 Dev tools - There was an interesting demo of debuggig support within IE8 to inspect how and where styles are being manipulated, even if they are being manipulated at run time. I didn't see much intellisense support in the debugging experience, but this will be a great help to developers.
- IE8 Activities - Some neat demos showing how you could highlight an address in a web page, right click on the selection and see a windows live map of it inline with the page. You also get the option to open the map in a separate tab. Developers can easily modify their web pages to allow their activities to be integrated into the web. They showed an example of viewing ebay listings inline.
- WebSlices - Think of these as small pieces of the web that sit in your quick link bar. They showed how you can view all your facebook updates in the quick link bar. I wonder if this will get used much. Do people still use the quick link bar?
Silverlight
Scott gave the overview of the vision of how Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 sit in the market place. 1.0 was meant to drive adoption of the plugin. 2.0 Beta 1 was announced and was aimed at improving the media experience, reducing the TCO of Silverlight, and better leveraging Silverlight for monetization. Scott mentioned how Silverlight 1.1 was a 4.3 mb download. I didn't hear how large Silverlight 2 will be when it ships. They aim to improve the media experience through adaptive streaming of Videos. Silverlight will select the best bitrate based on the current network conditions. If network conditions deteriorate, it can switch bitrates inline without a hiccup. They are aiming to reduce the TCO through Windows Media Services 2008. This is a free product that can be installed into Windows Server 2008. It allows administrators to burst video down to the user at the beginning of the video ,then only buffer only 10 seconds ahead of what they're watching. This lessens the likelihood that the user would download the entire video, only to close it half way through watching it, thereby throwing away half of the server's bandwidth. Scott lastly talked about monetizing the internet. Scott and team showed off a Silverlight Add template that does sets up some of the plumbing for creating banner adds in silverlight. Expression Encoder also supports burning in adds into the bottom of a video that overlays a portion of the video. The ad can be a bitmap, video, or even xaml.
New Features
Microsoft really lowered the bar for entry to develop Silverlight applications with the introduction of controls for silverlight, including textbox, button, slider, a datagrid amongst others. I went into a breakout session that went deeper into this and impressed me even more with the controls. The controls are all open source and free for people to extend. The datagrid seemed pretty well featured and customizable. New layout controls such as the StackPannel were also introduced to help speed up laying out a Silverlight app. Microsoft also mentioned that you can now write Silverlight controls as web parts for Sharepoint. Silverlight also has some cool physics effects, such as a wave effect that a developer can apply to a video. All the rendering is pushed to the GPU, so CPU usage is low.
I'm heading to Las Vegas to attend Mix08. It is being held at the Venetian on the from Wednesday until Friday. I will be attending along with 6 other colleagues from Clarity. I'm looking forward to some of the sessions about Silverlight 2.0 It's exciting to see far the product has come. I am intrigued to see how it will can provide value to our clients. I will be blogging my experiences on a daily basis throughout the conference.
...Peter