Lab49 @ Mix09

Lab49’s Marc Jacobs and I were out at Microsoft’s Mix09 conference last week and, in conjunction with Zoom-In Online, we produced a number of blog postings & podcasts.

We produced a bunch of stuff, so here are all the podcasts in one place for your easy consumption.  As you will see & hear there’s a lot to keep up on.  But there was so much great information and exciting new developments that I’m sure we didn’t cover it all!  Read more...

• Christian Schormann, Group Program Manager for Expression Blend -  http://edgecastcdn.net/0005A0/blog/mix09_ChristianSchormann.mp3
• James Pratt, Senior Product Manager for Internet Explorer – http://edgecastcdn.net/0005A0/blog/mix09_JamesPratt.mp3

In association with Lab49, Zoom In Online is pleased to announce 2 more podcasts from the show floor of MIX 2009.

John Lam — IronRuby and DLR

Marc Jacobs speaks with John Lam about IronRuby and DLR


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In association with Lab49, Zoom In Online is pleased to announce 4 podcasts from the show floor of MIX 2009.

James Pratt — Internet Explorer 8

Daniel Chait speaks with James Pratt about the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8


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Here are Mix09, for some reason they thought it was a good idea to set up a stage and invite attendees to play Rock Band in public. Right outside the press work room, where I spend most of my time here. And, they turn it up loud!

All of us in the press work room have agreed, no civilian should be legally allowed to sing anything by Alice in Chains, Queen, or the Chili Peppers in public. Surely the Obama administration can do something about this.

At Mix I had the opportunity to test out the Microsoft Arc Mouse:

It’s a geniunely nice product – comfortable, solid feeling (it feels weighty for its size) and clever (folds up nicely and has a magnetic dock for its USB dongle).

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From my perspective, there is no more important product release previewed at MIX09 than Expression Blend 3.

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As you can see below, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt here at Mix09 that reads, "I’m Not Slacking Off. My Code’s Compiling":

Clearly this guy is not using PowerShell or the DLR!

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One of the most talked-about developments at the Microsoft Mix09 conference has been SketchFlow.

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Seems like there’s a bit of an insider slant regarding the sponsors of this year’s Microsoft Mix conference:

Microsoft Silverlight 3 is shaping up to be a very impressive release. While Silverlight 1.0 was a relatively narrow-purpose release, relevant mostly to streaming content delivery on the web, Silverlight 2.0 delivered a workable general purpose, cross-platform programming environment that leveraged the growing skills of .NET/WPF developers. But Silverlight 2.0 lacked many features and controls that WPF developers depended on, and it violated the WPF subset principle that Microsoft had set for itself to ensure that Silverlight applications could cross-compile with WPF.

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 Scott Guthrie put up a few slides at today’s MIX09 keynote showing some interesting adoption data for Microsoft Silverlight.

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Scott Guthrie delivered part two of this year’s MIX09 keynote speech, revealing just how Bill Buxton’s arguments for better design processes are affecting the developer tools shipping this year from Microsoft. He revealed a raft of product announcements and upcoming features.

First off, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 ships today.

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Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his MIX09 keynote that Microsoft Velocity, a distributed cache solution currently in CTP, would ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4. For application developers seeking to add scalability to web applications on a shoestring, this is interesting development.

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Bill Buxton kicked off the MIX09 keynote with emphasis on design and the design process. His message: "It’s a good time for design!"

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Microsoft’s really stepping up in terms of media support.  Scott Guthrie ran through the highlights and showed some great demos, on both the client (Silverlight) and server (IIS) side.
Silverlight 3:

• GPU Hardware Acceleration
• New Codec Support – H.264, AAC, MPEG-4
• Raw bitstream API for A/V (in C#)
• Improved logging for media analytics

IIS Media Services (available as a free download):

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Scott Guthrie reviewed Silverlight’s numbers:

• 150MM installations of Silverlight
• 300,m000 Developers & designers
• 200+ Partners in 30 countries
• 200+ Microsoft products & websites

Quite impressive uptake in a very short time.

Demo of StackOverflow.com as a showcase of a site built on the Microsoft platform.

Key stats:

600k daily pageviews
200k unique visitors daily

All run on a couple small commodity boxes and built in about 6 mos. Nice!

* Extra credit – people often ask them if it’s built in RoR which they take as a great compliment

Bill Buxton, at today’s Microsoft Mix09 keynote, made an excellent point regarding design; namely, that as software people we often spend way too much design time focused on the layout and visual aspects of design — what buttons are where, the set of input fields on a screen, etc — and not nearly enough on the transitions between states.

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The big demo during the Web section was around SuperPreview within Expression Web.
Key things SuperPreview does, brings up the page in a multi-browser comparison view, allowing you to see the same page in various browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE, etc) not only side by side, but in "onion skin" overlay mode, allowing you to see any differences between browsers.

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