Mix 08

Yes I am going to Mix 08. The conference is hosted by Microsoft and held at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The dates of the conference are March 5th, 6th and 7th.

Last year I went to Mix 07 and had a lot of fun. There they released SilverLight, and had many sessions on the coming release of VS2008. I also met some PM's from microsoft, had drinks at Pure with some of the MySpace IT people, and saw the Las Vegas Pussycat Dolls.

So Mix is billed as "The Next Web Now". This year Mix is focusing on VS2008, SilverLight, MVC, Dynamic Languages, LINQ and much more.

Check out the Mix08 website, ad remember I will be blogging from the show on anything interesting that is discussed, and will try to remember to take some pictures and post those too.

Mix 07 SilverLight

So Mix 07 main theme was Silverlight and how to use it.

Silverlight is a new Web presentation technology that is created to run on a variety of platforms. It enables the creation of rich, visually stunning and interactive experiences that can run everywhere: within browsers and on multiple devices and desktop operating systems (such as the Apple Macintosh). In consistency with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the presentation technology in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (the Windows programming infrastructure), XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) is the foundation of the Silverlight presentation capability. (This was taken right from Microsoft)

So think .Net version of Flash.

So what does this mean to me.... Well since most of the web site projects I work on are internal or B2B I really never needed flash so I never wanted to invest the time into learning it. That said the fact that version 1.1 Alpha supports .Net, Ican take advantage of Silverlight since I know .Net. So that leaves the real question of will I use it?

The answer of that question is tough. All the examples that were shown to us were very cool uses of the technology. The thing is though all the demos were for sites that were more customer oriented. I am not saying that some of the things cant be brought into my development, for example I could see doing some interactive menus, similar to this. Or even maybe something like this.

I will be thinking of ways to try and use this technology more in my applications. What I wont do is use it just for the sake of using it. So if anyone out there can think of some possible uses of Silverlight let me know.

Mix 07 Orcas

So One of the better sessions I went while at Mix 07 was on Orcas. Orcas is the next version of visual studio. The tool takes a big jump from VS 2005.

Here is a quick list of things I found interesting and exciting.

• multi compiler support.
• What this means is that it will compile 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 code. So you wont need to have multiple versions of Visual Studio installed. So if you have a client who is doing 2.0 and one doing 3.0 work, you can use the same tool for both code bases.
• Smart intellisence of .JS files.
• the ide will figure out what your javascript vars are.
• the ide will now support break points and debugging of JS files.
• AJAX .net is included in the templates.
• LINQ support is also included in the ide.
• LINQ is pretty cool, they showed some pretty basic examples.

Mix 07

I am back from Mix 07 and boy was it fun.

In this post I am just going to recap my trip and the conference. In following post I will talk about specific things form the conference.

The conference was in Las Vegas and it was held at the Venetian. The Venetian is nice and they do a good job of taking care of you. The hotel rooms were very big and pricey. They were running $259 with the conference special. Each room had three areas, a sleeping area, a living room/work area, and a bathroom.

The first thing I did was check into the conference. I was given a bag of swag and directions to get some more. All in all I was impressed with what I got. I think there were full copy of vista ultimate, Studio express, orcas and some other things like a notebook, a pen, and memory drive.

The keynotes were very entertaining. The sessions for the most part were informative and well planned and presented. I will discus the opening keynote along with information I got from the breakouts in future posts.

Microsoft hosted a Silverlight part at Pure. They sprung for all the drinks and food. It also included a show by the Pussycat Dolls. At the show I met a project manager from Microsoft that worked on the .Net CLR for Silverlight.

As for the Vegas part of the trip, well I don't have much to tell. I did gamble some, and I ate well. I learned a lot and had fun what more could you ask for?