Mix08 Day 2
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.