Got back from Mix 08 (Las Vegas) on Monday. Overall, a great conference - all of the sessions I attended were (on the whole) above average, both in terms of content and delivery. The venue (Venetian Hotel) was cooool and oozed class. The delegates were enthusiastic and knowledgeable, and keen to learn and chat. You could say a pleasure to 'mix' with then, ugh! The jet-lag was a pain, and I really suffered for the first few days, but I cannot blame the organisers for that ;-)
Organisation of the conference was good - all sessions started/finished promptly and rooms were nice with excellent large 'hi def' screens and audio in the main keynote area (the best I've seen/heard at such a conf). Some rooms were overcrowded but this is often a problem with multi-track events like these.
There were a few oddities though, regarding organisation. For example, in the conference suite areas, large 'bouncers' were present on door entrances/exits/top of stairways etc whom acted as if they were manning a nightclub... "your names not down, you're not coming in" stylee. Sorry guys but this is a conference not some downtime bar!
Secondly, the delegate bags were poor. Made from what I can only describe as white Tarpaulin, the bags felt cheap and to be honest... 'a bit gay'. Man-bags were to be seen everywhere. I couldn't bring myself to wear mine!
Finally, the organisers had chosen to put all session summaries on the web (fine, makes sense) but did not put session summary printouts in the delegate pack (only a card 'title and time only' jobby) - not ideal. After virtually every session, delegates (me included) rushed to the PC area to look up the descriptions of their next session (the online session builder is fine if you plan ahead, but I, like most, didn't). I'm all for technology but last-minute-printed, paper-based short summaries, in this case, would have been more useful for day-to-day ref during the conference. Anyway... I'm rambling...
Points of interest
What were the interesting bits then? The keynotes in particular are worth a mention.
Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie's Keynote on Day 1 was impressive (although Ray's bits were a bit glossy and high level for me), summarising nicely what MS's plans are for the next 12 months or so. In particular they discussed plans for:
- Personal device meshes
- Connected entertainment. License media once and use on 'any device'
- Connectivity productivity... Office live
- Office communication server
- Connected business enterprise.
- Connected development. XNA, Silverlight, VS, .Net, WPF
- IIS7 - "probably the most significant web server for MS to date"
- IE 8 seen for the first time at the conf (more on that later) . Beta 1 now avail for download.
- Silverlight 2.0 - gaining popularity, e.g. vs 1.0 currently receiving 1.5 million downloads per day. vs 2.0 beta 1 now available.
The final item, Silverlight, is worth more discussion. Vs 2.0 is very significant for MS. It bundles a cut down version of .Net which can run in the browser opening up a whole breed of RIA (Rich Interface Applications) on the web. We saw a number of fairly impressive demos, including:
- Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia site - Silverlight is used to allow users to browse and zoom into various famous artifacts (uses DeepZoom - the follow up to Seadragon). You can see this for yourself at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com. Go to the site, install Silverlight (if you've not got this already you will be prompted), and you will be able to browse and zoom into the impressive music memorabilia collection. To give you an idea of what is involved, one of the guitar images on the site was created using "57 stitched high quality SLR photos" in order to give the necessary detail when zoomed to the max.
- Beijing Olympics 2008 site by NBC. They intend to put some 2200 hours of high quality video on the web. Users will be able to replay live footage. The demo was slick and certainly showed off Silverlight's strengths for handling media... but hey, the videos were running locally so I'd expect the quality to be good! I will be very interested (and surprised) if the final live site is as impressive. Surely bandwidth limitations will kick in as the millions of visitors surf to watch their heroes in action. I just hope graceful degradation is built in... Silverlight's 'progressive download' adaptive streaming and the new IIS Media Pack bit rate throttling can only do so much...
- AstonMartin.com. Able to wonder around the gorgeous DBS and zoom in via 'deep zoom' etc. You can even zoom inside and view the stitching on the leather. New site does not appear to be live yet (current live version is flash)
- AOL Email Web Client. Current version uses DHTML and AJAX, but new version will be full blown Silverlight utilising isolated storage and skinning features etc.
The Keynote on day 2 by Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasiki was cool. Guy (who goes back a long way with Steve) threw some good questions at SB which he answered in his usual enthusiastic and entertaining way. After listening to the banter for an hour or so, one thing I took away was that Steve genuinely has a passion for Microsoft and its success. It was a pleasure to listen to someone who clearly loves his company (and the millions it makes him every year no doubt!). I was impressed.
Other sessions I attended which are worth mentioning:
- Crossing the Usability Chasm - Advanced and Adaptive User Interfaces. Gil Hupert-Graff, Yochay Kiriaty. Tackled UIs that can adapt to the user (e.g. beginner vs advanced etc). Having an HCI/usability background I found little to learn in this session (disappointing) but for those new to the 'adaptive UI' idea, there were many points to pick up on. Changing the UI at runtime based on the user's experience and usage patterns is an interesting area.
- Building Rich Internet Applications Using Microsoft Silverlight 2, Part 1 and 2. Mike Harsh, Joe Stegman. Two sessions on using VS to build Silverlight apps utilising XAML, Web Services and LINQ. Very well done.
- Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Model View Controller (MVC) Pattern. Scott Hanselman. Excellent presentation by Scott whom I have a lot of respect for. Covered the MVC (front controller) pattern and how it is implemented in ASP.Net MVC. Also highlighted the pros/cons of the approach, pointing out that it is not for everyone. The page control model (especially for complex web forms) is still a contender but the merits of MVC, e.g. aiding TDD (test driven development etc) and meaningful URIs etc, cannot be overlooked.
- Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8. Scott Dickens. One of two sessions I attended on IE8, this was the better of the two. Scott covered in detail the new layout engine of IE 8. The MSHTML engine has been re-written to be fully standards compliant but now has two code paths (one for old IE 7 compatibility and another for full IE 8 standards mode).
- Hard Rock: Behind the Music with Deep Zoom. Scott Stanfield. Case study style session discussing how the site was built (see earlier re hard rock memorabilia site).
- Lighting Up Your AJAX Applications with Silverlight. Stefan Schackow, Chung Webster. Integrating Silverlight and AJAX. Included background processing and IsolatedStorage. Use of the new History object for back button support in AJAX (hooray!).
- Designing Next Generation User Interface Experiences with Microsoft Expression Blend and Windows Presentation Foundation. Johnathan Lansing, Stuart Mayhew, Nicholas Petterssen. The guys from Electric Rain gave a detailed account of their WPF application 'StandOut' (actually presented using the tool). If you are bored with powerpoint, maybe the StandOut app is for you. A true whizzy multimedia experience. When asked how long the project took though.. "ermm... just the 5 years". RAD at its best then! To be fair, this was "from initial idea to finished product" - nevertheless seems a difficult one to justify from a ROI standpoint - depends on your measurements of success I guess.
- Sandbox area: Surface. I saw a fascinating demo of Microsoft Surface in action (I also tried it out for myself). Demo consisted of what was essentially 'a glass coffee table' with a touch screen interface. The software demonstrated was a restaurant menu. See an earlier youtube Surface demo here. Apparently T-Mobile have signed up to use the technology 'in production'.
IE 8 was mentioned a number of times in various sessions and looks like it is worth waiting for, bits of interest are:
- Standards and quirks modes. IE 8 will by default be 'very' standards compliant (to the point that many older sites will no doubt break). CSS 2.1 standards based. HTML 5. IE 8 will pass the Acid2 test.
- IE 8 Web Slices - allows a user to subscribe to 'areas of a page' which then appears as a link on the user's IE 8 toolbar. If that page section updates, the link will highlight to indicate it has been modified. The author of the page decides where the slice begins and ends using markup.
- IE 8 Activities. Via XML markup (see OpenService Architecture), rather than just having simple URI links to other pages, you can now add 'in page menus of activities' such as 'buy now on Amazon'.
- Developer tools now built-in (bit like the IE developer toolbar you could install in IE 6/7). This offers JS debugging and CSS rules/hierarchies. For example you can highlight an element on the page and see which CSS rule is taking priority.
- 'IE 7 Quirks' mode option currently has its own dedicated button on the toolbar (for those sites that refuse to work with IE 8 then!)
So overall, a fab conference. In case you are interested they have already set the date for next year's Mix 09, March 18 to 20th, 2009 ;-)
Clarkey
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