Dave Bost

By: Long Zheng

Scott Guthrie was…er…juggling the keynote at MIX’08 this year. You could say he was head ringmaster. As opposed to Ray Ozzie kicking MIX off with a short intro into his vision of cloud-based computing, ScottGu was leading us through the majority of keynote festivities. Scott gave up the stage for a brief moment to Dean Hachamovitch, to give us all an update on IE8 and the direction it is headed in. When the stage was handed back to ScottGu, things really got rockin’. Including an announcement that the Silverlight plug-in is averaging 1.5 Million downloads per day! Not a bad start.

Most of the keynote centered around the roadmap and feature list for Silverlight 2 (SL2). It was announced at MIX that Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download and comes with a go-live license for early adopters. Some of the great new features of Silverlight 2 include:

• Adaptive Streaming; Silverlight can analyze the available bandwidth between client and server and adjust accordingly to provide an acceptable user experience while streaming video.
• Silverlight Advertisement Templates for Visual Studio; a project wizard to help define advertisement type, size, placement, etc.
• Rich UI Framework – CONTROLS!; Calendar, Button, Slider, CheckBox, DataGrid, etc. all with Layout management, Resize, etc.
• Multi-language support
• Data-binding support
• Rich Skinning, Style and Animation
• Robust Network support; Socket support (who doesn’t love sockets???)
• Integrated Data support; LINQ support and local data cache
• Two words – Deep Zoom

The keynote included a number of customer examples including an amazing showcase by NBC and the Olympics. They are really going to be putting Silverlight through it’s paces. Over 2200 hours of live footage that will all eventually be available for on demand viewing. From there, you can edit the clips and share them with your friends. They will collect all of the highlights and share them with the community of viewers from around the world. You are put in control of what coverage you’d like to see at the Olympics. Pretty amazing!

Hard Rock teamed up with Vertigo Software to build Memorabilia 2.0 that uses the new Deep Zoom technology built into Silverlight 2. Deep Zoom is the culmination of the Sea Dragon project that came out of Windows Live Labs. It allows you to scale in and out of high-res images, only using the bandwidth it needs to show the particular part of the image you are viewing. In Hard Rock’s case, they took a number of high-res images of some of their memorabilia collection, stitched them together and created a 2-billion pixel image that you can interact with. You can also apply metadata to the image to provide a customized view, for example sorting based on musical era, genre, alphabetical based on band name, etc. The best thing about this demo is the fact that you can interact with it right now – it’s live! I can’t wait to see what other usage scenarios come up for this technology.

Other demos included AOL showcasing how they rewrote their entire AOL Mail client in Silverlight. This was all about increasing performance over their HTML/AJAX implementation and providing a better user experience for the customer. They succeeded.

Both Cirque du Soleil and Aston Martin showcased how they are using WPF technology for their line-of-business applications.

There were also some server-side announcements as well. The new Windows Media Services 2008 brings 3x scalability to media hosting in IIS7 all for the low-low cost of – FREE! Also with the IIS7 Media Pack, web server administrators have control over how many bits they send over the wire with Bit-rate throttling built-in.

Not that this wasn’t enough, but we also learned of the future Silverlight on Mobile plans. We were treated to some early news just prior to MIX when it announced that Nokia would be supporting Silverlight on its S60, Series 40 phones and Internet tablets. The plans are to release a developer CTP for Silverlight for Mobile in the 2nd quarter of 2008. This is targeting Silverlight 1.0 at this time. There was no word on Silvelright 2 for Mobile plans.

All in all, a great keynote. But why are you reading this? You should be watching the whole thing online, through Silverlight of course, at http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=KYN0801.

Uncategorized

By Long Zheng

I had the fortune to attend the MIX conference last week. Although my notes are little late (more on that later), I wanted to get them up here soon enough for your reading enjoyment.

Dean Hachamovitch took the stage at MIX to finally layout the plans for the next release of Internet Explorer – IE8. Here are a few quick notes that I was able to capture while sitting in an overflow room with about 200-300 other Microsoft employees.

IE 8 Beta 1 is available now – this is a build release purely for developers and web designers. Dean said they focused on security for IE7. With IE8 the focus moves to the developer and the semantic web. Dean highlighted several points:

• IE 8 is targeting CSS 2.1 compliance. IE has been knocked for its CSS implementations in the past. Most of that was due to either implementations before a standard existed or the ambiguity that surrounds the CSS specification. Microsoft feels that CSS 2.1 is less ambiguous and will work with the developer community and the standards committees to make interpretation is inline.
• CSS Certification – Microsoft is contributing over 700 test cases to the CSS working group. These test cases are available to the open community as well.
• Performance – huge performance increases since IE7. Coming closer inline with other recently released browsers. There is more work to do in this area before IE8 ships.
• HTML5 – start of support for HTML5, deeper integration between the browser and AJAX, and making web pages network aware.
• Developer Tools – dev tools integration in the browser, including debugging support. One of the interesting features here is the dynamic page analysis in which the dev tools will report back the HTML as it stands in memory. Think of how AJAX calls may modify the DOM during runtime. Dynamic analysis will report back what’s the true state of the DOM, not what was first loaded from the initial server request. Very cool!
• Activities – smart tags for the web? Highlight an address and a context pops up that links you to Live Maps. Highlight a product name and link to an Ebay auction for that item. This is all done through minimal XML markup within the HTML elements themselves.
• WebSlices – “subscribe” to a portion of web content on a page. Such as an Ebay auction watch window, your friends status in Facebook, the current weather listing on Weather.com, etc. Once again, minimal XML markup within the HTML elements defines a web slice.

Uncategorized