MIX was a great event again this year! I was only there for Wednesday and Thursday in order to save some money. It was great to hang out with our local Microsoft guys (Denny, Clint, and their other brother Clint). I also said a brief hello to Microsoft (and former Quilogy guy) Jon Box. Finally, I spent a significant amount of time with Quilogy's own Mark Riemann, SSE's Kevin Grossnicklaus, and Winchester's Derek Jerrell.
My notes:
- Deborah Adler's keynote was fantastic! She basically reminds developers and designers to focus on the user experience and make the technology and aesthetics secondary.
- Scott Guthrie's keynote was primarily focused on the new Silverlight and Blend features.
- Blend 3 (preview available):
- SketchFlow!!! You can make your comps in layered .psd files and import them into a flowchart that can show simple animations and transitions. You can package up this "working" prototype and send it to a client for interactive playback AND annotation!
- Silverlight 3 (beta available) looks pretty good finally! It still doesn't hold a candle to WPF, but it has enough maturity now to view it as a real option for application development.
Useful sessions I attended:
- "What's New in Microsoft Silverlight 3.0" (Wednesday) - This session was a great run-through of several new features in Silverlight. Joe Stegman covered the very cool new video features including the adaptive video and effects. He also covered the interesting out-of-browser and cross-browser functionality.
- "Live Framework and Mesh Services: Live Services for Developers" (Wednesday)
- "Using Microsoft ASP.NET MVC to Easily Extend a Web Site into the Mobile Space" (Thursday)
- "Improving UX Through Application Lifecycle Management" (Wednesday)
VERY cool, but not very useful, session:
- "Using Total Experience Design To Transform The Digital Building" (Thursday)
All of these conferences and events are about networking. All of the presented sessions are available online, so I focused on attending sessions where I knew the presenter. If you are disappointed that you didn't get to go, because you thought this would be a great jumpstart to your training, do not worry. These conferences are a terrible way to learn something, but the sessions are great for exposure. (You can play these back at double-speed in Windows Media Player and probably do 3x the number of sessions in the comfort of your own home.)
The presentation of the Winchester Ballistics Calculator was alright. They had the Partner Showcase area in a terrible location where very few people walked by. It didn't help that our presentation was first thing in the morning, so people didn't really show up until afterwards for Thursday's keynote. The whole Partner Showcase was really disorganized as far as where we were supposed to be and when. Most importantly though, it will be available on video through the MIX site.
I am going to continue going through the various session videos and I will post my reviews of those as well. I will also add more notes on the conference in the coming days, but I gotta get back to work!
