MIX Day 1

mbohn — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:20:00 GMT

Who said Johny Cash and Microsoft don't mix? Well at MIX they do, as listeners were serenaded with Johny Cash as they waited for the event to start. Once it started there was no lack of eye popping demos.

Microsoft kicked off MIX today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, and Dean Hachamovitch.

Ray Ozzie, announced Microsoft's commitment to expanding their advertisement platform, potentially through acquiring Yahoo. Wow!! He also discussed Microsoft's software + services strategy to enable users to connect all their devices, to enable connected entertainment, and to enable business to connect like they never have before. In the user space, Microsoft's direction would be to allow a user to synchronize all their devices using Microsoft software and the internet as a hub. One example Ozzie used was having devices report their status via the web and allow them to be remotely managed. Instead of thinking in terms of a single PC, users would have a mesh of devices they could manage.

For businesses Microsoft seemed to communicate a vision of having software products that live on a PC and services such as Office Live that would provide rich internet applications and services over the web. Ozzie also mentioned having exchange and communications server available as products an enterprise could install on their own server or could pay for as services in the cloud, which would reduce the IT burden on some companies. He also spoke briefly regarding SQL Data Services, it wasn't quite clear if and when this will be available, but it seemed that this would would equate to Microsoft providing database solutions as a service.

After Ozzie, Scott Guthrie was next up talking about .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008, IIS 7, the ASP.NET MVC Preview, and the Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 preview. .NET 3.5 contains enhancements that include javascript intellisense, integrated javascript debugging with VS 2008, and LINQ (language integrated query).

Scott then handed it over to Dean Hachamovitch to talk about IE 8 and I would guess every developer liked what they heard. One of the major goals of IE 8 is to allow developers to spend less time getting their code to work in all browsers. To that end IE 8 will be standards compliant with CSS 2.1 and HTML 5. Microsoft also is working toward a CSS certification process with the W3C, and to that end they have submitted testcases to W3C under the BSD license. They have requested developer feedback on the test cases. My understanding of this is that Microsoft isn't certifying IE 8 as much as trying to promote a standard test and certification process for all browsers to under go to be compliant, which I think is a great idea. The other area of improvement in IE 8 should be performance. It was mentioned that scripting performance could improve by 2.5x. Some other nice features that will be unveiled in IE 8 are listed here:

Improvements for AJAX and usability - For example, in IE 8 clicking the back or forward button will allow you to actually go back thru your history of AJAX partial page updates.
Connectivity events - This should allow events to be raised in the browser when a user's internet connection is lost. If they are on a form their data can be saved locally until the connection is restored.
Developer Tools - IE 8 will provide developer tools very similar to the FireFox plugin FireBug. This tool will allow developers to debug client script much like they debug code in Visual studio. They can set watches, break points, and browse and search styles. Applause?? This feature got the applause from the developers in the crowd.
Web Activities - This concept is very new and very hard to describe without demo. One example shown was a user right clicking on a street address and the context menu had a "map it" option. Microsoft has created an open service spec that would allow developers to create their own activities.
Web slices - This feature would allow a user to subscribe to a portion of a page they are interested in and add it to their favorites so they can stay updated.

IE 8 Beta 1 is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

After the IE 8 presentation, SilverLight took the show. SilverLight 2.0 should have the following features and benefits

Reduced total cost of ownership - This will be achieved thru adaptive streaming and Windows Media Services 2008 (which is free for any edition of 2008 server system)
Progressive download and bit rate throttling via IIS and the media services pack. This will allow admins to allow a burst of data to be streamed and then throttle the rate back. The idea is to save cost since more content may get streamed that a user will actually watch
Adaptive streaming - This allows SilverLight to adjust the streaming bit rate as connection speed changes.
Integrating Advertising - SilverLight 2.0 will allow better integration with click tracking services.
Multi language support
A subset of the WPF framework is contained within Silverlight to allow developers to build rich internet applications with textboxes and grids etc.
Deep Zoom - This will provide a framework for developers to quickly create stitched zooming applications very similar to google maps. Deep Zoom Composer will be a tool that will automatically generate the slices to do this easily.

The preview release of SilverLight 2.0 Beta 1 was made available today at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E0BAE58E-9C0B-4090-A1DB-F134D9F095FD&displaylang=en.

Thats alot for a day!

Matt’s Blog : IE8

MIX Day 1