Virtual Earth integration from Silverlight was the highlight. Once again a nice clean API allows developers to pick it up, with fully integrated customised maps in Silverlight developed faster than previously possible. Video and media asset integration, scaling/zooming/”deep zoomesque” capabilities, and the ability to feed in your own map data.

So how easy is it?  Well, first up you need the control DLL.  And once you’ve done that, you’ll need the following XAML…

<UserControl x:Class="MapControlInteractiveSdk.Tutorials.Tutorial1"
     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
     xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl;
                assembly=Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl">
   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
     <m:Map />
   </Grid>
</UserControl>

BAM!  Map with controls in Silverlight in 3 seconds.  Even more impressive is all the small tweaks you can do in only a few lines of code.  Chris Pendleton has a wrap up and other posts over at the Virtual Earth Evangelist’s Blog, so check out further details.

Another session I found interesting was Pigmap. All I could ascertain is that the translated meaning behind the brand could probably translate to ‘cash cow’, and although the presentation had a lot to be desired, the Korean markets tend to push online community concepts many years before the western world picks them up.

Pigmap will be a social networking site.  It leverages Virtual Earth, flickr, and other services (OpenID, Live ID etc). To provide users with mapping, it searches Virtual Earth for certain locations and venues. So search for Las Vegas NV, and BAM, Las Vegas turns up on the map. But then type in ‘Venetian’ as a point of interest, and the platform searches Flickr for photos matching Venetian, grabs their geo coordinates, and drops thumbnails on the map (“The End of Theory” theory strikes again).

The questionable feature of the site is the ability to set “Missions” for people using the product. To be able to go “Dear X, I challenge you to go to this location” doesn’t really appeal to me, but “Dear X, you want to head here tonight?” might work, but many other services provide that functionality. Possibly Korea is too far ahead culturally with social networking that it zips over my head.

And that’s a wrap from MIX09. There is just so much more to talk about, and many of that will come with some of the posts that grow out of playing with the new toys. Head on over to the downloads page to grab your favourite preview/beta/CTP/SDK… and remember to check out the sessions at sessions.visitmix.com.

MIX oh-ten has been announced, and I’m excited to see where the designer and developer community has taken these tools by then. 

Catch you online when I land back in Australia. 

Now that you’ve done that, we’ll continue.

The biggest benefit I see for agencies and services companies is the seamless integration, and to close the loop built in streamlined review mechanisms. Although Silverlight is a great technology and the obvious place Sketch Flow would help most, Sketch Flow will be useful for any type of web project. From presales through to design, it opens the door for rapid prototyping, with the cost of finding the best user experience drastically reduced. The documentation and auto data population features are so obvious and simple, yet dream features for developers. So big thumbs up for Sketch Flow.

Yesterday’s Live Services session had me falling off my chair. It was just too easy. If you aren’t looking at Mesh, you are being left behind… the possibilities are huge.

Second on the agenda was the VERTIGO presentation. Lots of sites developed in short periods of time, using some great Microsoft technologies such as Deep Zoom and Silverlight 3. KEXP, Rolling Stone magazine archive, March Madness, and the big one, www.playboyarchive.com. The presentation covered projects of catalogued back issues of magazines, radio station download managers, and interactive live video streaming. Such a broad consumer offering, based on the same core technology stack. The Playboy archive consists of over 2 million individual files that make up the multiscaleimage, coming in at 30GB of data. But what is even truly mind blowing, is the fact all text in the deep zoom is searchable, including the advertisements, the comics, and the articles.

To go over www.playboyarchive.com in a bit more detail (assuming you are still reading and haven’t clicked the link in the first few seconds), from the home page you click through to the DeepZoom based Silverlight application.

Then clicking on a cover takes you into an issue. Clicking on pages brings that page into full view.

And an example of searching, with full highlighting, deep linked to from the search results below.  (Just don’t ask how they afforded the army of chimps to highlight all the text.)

For those that feel dubious heading over and checking it out, the older 1960’s magazines are generally work safe for the first 60 pages, if not cover to cover.

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.

MIX09 looks to be an awesome conference this year, and I’m really looking forward to the sessions, and spending a week with some great minds.  Although my heart lies with the Silverlight 3 render pipeline session, I see the broader opportunities and scope lying with Live and Azure.  Where Microsoft plan to head with these platforms will be great to hear.  From a digital market perspective.

I look around the lounge and can spot the MIX09ites.  They size each other up with that ‘I know what you are’ look, a sixth sense at detecting your own breed.  Not that it’s hard to pick us out.  All on laptops, with their minor signature traits…  a MacBook with the logo turned into a biohazard symbol, a t-shirt with ‘rtfm’ in hex (because in English it’s not geeky enough), the Microsoft blooded individuals (clothing or backpacks branded with TechEd, PDC, Azure, Live et al), and me, with my trusty Dr Cube’s Posse t-shirt (more better fighto!).

But it’s the geek crew that add the real value to the trip to Vegas.  It will be the conversations and learning from industry peers (clients and vendors alike) that will be most value.  These are the like minded people that bend technology into the shape of something beautiful.  They embrace and drive technology, and influence the directions of platforms.  The personal and business value of being connected to that giant talent should never be underestimated.

And lastly, I’m trying out BlogJet for my offline WordPress blogging needs.  So let’s see how that goes… [edit] In summary, BlogJet created MS Word HTML shit, which meant it didn’t render consistently, if at all, so thumbs down.