@MIX09 Impressive Start
I’m at MIX09 in Las Vegas the lone attendee in early waiting for the 2nd session I’m attending to kick off. Day 1 is turning out to be quite impressive. Up early for registration to miss the queues, and to hopefully catch breakfast (a 24 hour meal in Las Vegas). Registration was painless, and with my swag of Microsoft goodies I headed to the keynote.
Bill Burton and Scott Guthri were impressive. Their views were insightful, reinforcing, and the technology announcements presented were just as impressive. I recommend checking out the keynote over at live.visitmix.com. The technology announcements and demos were impressive. From Expression Blend, to IIS administration, the new features are market driving. Some are ‘about time’ and others ‘just in time’, others ahead of their time. The consistency and pipeline Microsoft provide for delivery between developers and designers with Expression, or the ease with which IIS and IIS applications can be managed are needed.
Not only were the Microsoft demos impressive, so were Netflix and BONDI/Vertigo. With Netflix being able to offer to a broader sprectrum of the consumer market, and release fortnightly instead of annually, their business has transformed. Similarly BONDI, specialists in back catalogue magazine capitalisation, created an entire new business, with the entire back catalogue of Rolling Stone magazine indexed, searchable, leveraging Silverlight 3 and deep zoom for a completely new visual experience.
Silverlight is a technology that is moving so fast I find it hard to keep up. The new pixel shader effects are exciting, and so easy it feels like cheating. Being able to splash them around on *any* control is too much fun. Be prepared for gratuitous overload for the first few months/years. Scott Guthri’s demo is worth watching to understand this. Even though Scott jokes, someone will put perspective and ripple effects on forms, and 10 people will copy that, and so on. Impressive features now in Silverlight include the ability to pump videos to FTP/WebDav locations direct from encoding, adaptive streaming over HTTP. Silverlight 3 also brings thick client “out of browser” applications. These also come with auto update features, online and offline synchronisation and data binding, and all out of the box. This isn’t just a Silverlight .NET shell for apps to run under windows, it comes with a full blown API for network connectivity detection. These applications are also running under OSX, as was demo’d in the keynote by KEXP radio. KEXP have an offline player, with online synchronisation and features, single click install (The install was such a non event most people missed it!).
Lunch consumed, and session 2 is about to start, the room looks empty. With 10 sessions going at the same time, this is a great way to have small intimate groups with audience participation/interaction.
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