MIX 2009 - Day 1 Recap

The first day of MIX 2009 was an interesting one. I've never been to a MIX before - my usual Microsoft conference agenda involves conferences like Tech-Ed and PDC and going to local Microsoft events or the occasional summit up in Redmond, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

I realize that it is a designer and developer conference (hence the term "MIX") but it still feels kind of like Microsoft can't quite figure out what message they want to deliver. Some of the designer-focused sessions seemed too technical and some of the technical sessions seemed to designer-y, but otherwise I learned a lot and got a lot of really useful information yesterday.

First and foremost: the SWAG report: A leather-wrapped coffee travel mug, a plastic water bottle, a free copy of Buxton's book, a free copy of "First Look Silverlight 3", a DVD of Windows Web Server, a thumb drive, a t-shirt, a pretty flimsy tote (fell apart under the weight of the SWAG), and a really well-bound journal for taking notes.

OK, with that out of the way we can get to the content. I'm going to run through the major highlights from yesterday in bullet form because I plan on doing individual blog posts on some of the other technology that I saw (such as Silverlight 3).

• Buxton's keynote was very inspired and he was very excited about industrial design. He lost a few points by bringing up the Zune in the same context as bringing up past successes of industrial design, but otherwise the keynote was very informative and inspiring. The key take away is that you are building and selling an experience, not a product or a thing.
  • noteworthy quote: "If you don't have as much detail in transitions as in states, you're going to get it wrong" - said when talking about sketching out application states and flow.
• The HP touchsmart demo failed (monitor wouldn't respond to touches) :)
• Scott Guthrie was given a hero's welcome. His video about getting ready to present his keynote, including jokes about his red polo and him in full "stayin' alive" disco gear is sure to replace the infamous "Bill Gates retiring" video as an epic cheese-filled achievement.
• SuperPreview - a technology that is part of Expression Web 3 that allows you to view the baseline version of a web page, compare using overlay with other rendering engines, etc.
  • SP can even talk to a cloud service to get a page rendered for a particular target browser/engine even if that engine isn't on your computer. This means you can now SxS compare Ie6,7,8 as well as Firefox, Safari, and Chrome without having to have them all installed on your machine.
  • If you are building HTML and CSS stuff, SuperPreview will absolutely make your life easier.
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 shipped yesterday (congratulations to all involved, this is a fantastic product and a testament to the idea that Microsoft actually can build lean, agile, bloat-free products)
• ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 - velocity (distributed caching) will be rolled into ASP.NET 4. ASP.NET 4 also gets the dynamic routing engine built originally for MVC.
• Netflix - championed Silverlight and Silverlight 3 because it makes it so that their customers don't have an install experience ("Installers are Evil!" was his quote) and it runs on Windows and the Mac.
• Silverlight 3 has new codec support - H.264, AAC, MP4. To anybody who has considered using Silverlight for media and decided against it - this is HUGE.
• IIS Media Services - a new back-end for streaming media to Silverlight clients.
• 2010 Olympics is going to be in full 720p HD online using Silverlight 3, complete with DVR controls like pause, rewind, etc.
• Silverlight 3 and Blend 3 can now import assets directly from Photoshop and Illustrator. I cannot possibly make it clear enough how incredibly useful this is.
• Blend 3 is getting SketchFlow, a way to quickly go from idea to prototype.
• SL3 has client/server proxies and new libraries to make multi-tier apps using SL3 easier to build
• SL3 now has the ability to install offline and become aware of network changes (think of this as ClickOnce, next generation, for Silverlight). I will be posting more about this in my upcoming SL3 post. Again, this is HUGE HUGE HUGE.

I really dislike using the bullet form to do blog posts, but there was so much information crammed into the keynote that I just wouldn't be able to create some readable narration of it without making it so long that your eyes glazed over and you fell asleep before finishing reading the article.

The main takeaways for me from the keynote are that Microsoft is investing a LOT of time, effort, and marketing around Silverlight 3 and with good reason. Years and years ago, when IE4 came out, I remember saying how the line between the browser and the desktop was going to become irrelevant to the end user - their data comes from the Internet and people won't care if they are using a downloaded semi-offline RIA or a desktop app. That future is coming and SL3 is going to be right there at the forefront.

Noticeably (for me at least) absent from the keynote was a good overview of Windows Azure. Azure is huge and I was hoping it would get more "air time" as it were, but I can see how at a half-designer conference, ultra-geeky stuff like cloud storage, the ServiceBus, and SQL Data Services would bog down an otherwise glitzy and shiny bouncing keynote.

Again, stay tuned because I'll be posting more detailed blog posts related to the technology that I've been seeing.

tags: mix09  mix2009  mix  microsoft  conference  

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