Expression & UX in Asia : MIX08

@ MIX08

Leon Brown — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:18:22 GMT

It has been a busy week this week. I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday and have been really enjoying meeting with colleagues from around the world and customers and partners who made the decision to join the event.

As a Microsoft employee, you sometimes think you know all that is going on, but I have to say that I was still very impressed by the sheer number of announcements that we tried to squeeze in to a single keynote this week. Wednesday's keynote was kicked off by Ray Ozzie, and, though not my high point of the kickoff, it is certainly interesting to hear what he is thinking as I find him somewhat of an enigma.

The keynote covered a number of pieces of the Silverlight story, as well as work with partners and updates to the Expression products.

Silverlight 2 beta 1: This update to the Silverlight runtime is fully compatible with all the v1 sites out there, but now includes the .NET support that was promised a year ago and a limited GoLive license. The reaction from people at the conference was genuinely positive with, as expected, Microsoft developers being the most happy. I did have a random chat with a designer from an agency in the U.S. and he expressed being interested in learning SL now that he'd seen the show cases. To build Silverlight 2 beta content you'll want to download the beta of Expression Blend 2.5 (yeah, the version numbers are out of sync, hard to solve that one).

Expression v2 betas: Expression v2 products are getting close and we released beta versions of the products. Blend v2 supports Silverlight v1, Expression Web v2 supports PHP and many other nice features. Check out Expression Encoder v2 which added simple editing, better encoding, new UI. All the features are listed on the Expression Encoder blog. I really like this product and find I use it quite a bit.

The partner products shown were really nice. IMHO the best was a fairly simple site for the NBC production of the Olympics. The challenge they took on was to make all the broadcasts and all content available both synchronously and asynchronously so the volume of video content they'll support is huge! They choose Silverlight for the player side since they felt the infrastructure for Windows Media was more suitable and scaled better than Flash video infrastructure and serving. Also discussed was Double Click allowing Silverlight content and their upcoming release of a SDK to support in-stream advertising on their networks. Move Networks also added Silverlight support, and partners such as AOL and Aston Martin showed off applications using Silverlight.

Silverlight for mobile was big too. Nokia's announcement of support for Silverlight mobile came out earlier in the week. Nice to see the support of a company of Nokia's stature as we bring this out as they wouldn't do this unless they thought it had some value to their users.

And, lastly, but first in the keynote, is IE8 beta. I wasn't too fond of the presentation itself, but the content was great. IE7 has been so bad with standards and so slow to update that this was a huge relief. CSS2.1 support, new features (with code released under and open source license), test suites, in browser debugging. Check out the IE Blog for details. One point noted by pundit Joe Wilcox was that there were over 500 comments on the initial announcement blog post that were positive. A good start.

Lots of other things I enjoyed during the week. I'll start updating my blog a bit more when I get back and have time to sort through my notes.

MIX08 almost sold out

Leon Brown — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:30:15 GMT

MIX08 in Las Vegas is almost sold out. I am starting to look forward to seeing all the sessions and meeting everyone coming out to attend that I know. There are also some fun things going on at MIX this year. One that looks interesting is the following (clipped):

"The King of Kong's" Steve Wiebe attempts to reclaim his title at MIX08

Join middle-school science teacher, Steve Wiebe, on the evening of Tuesday, March 4th for a special MIX screening of New Line Cinema's "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.” The movie, featuring Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell’s quest to see who is the true King of Kong, will be followed by a Q&A session with Steve, producer Ed Cunningham, and Twin Galaxies referee Walter Day. Then, on Wednesday, March 5th, watch Steve try to recapture his world record at the MIX attendee party at TAO!

I'll be honest, when I saw the trailers for the movie I wasn't totally captivated, but it should be fun to see it live. I mean, Donkey Kong? Galaxian was my speed.

Anyhow, if you are going to be there, and for some odd reason happen to be reading my blog, drop me a note and let's hook up. Cheers.

MIX08 coming quickly

Leon Brown — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:06:00 GMT

If you haven't had a chance to take a look at the upcoming MIX08 sessions in Las Vegas, now isn't too late. Aside from a number of great tracks, there are a couple of nice new announcements I noticed today.

First is a contest.

A contest to restyle the MIX home page. Prize includes ticket to MIX08, three nights at the Venetian Hotel and US$1000 towards your travel. So, why is this good? Well they have a blog post on the visitmix site saying that only one person has submitted anything so far (24 January). Percentages are high that you could be successful. Designs must be submitted by 7 February.

And, there is a dedicated User Experience track at MIX08.

From the VisitMIX site:

It is official: 10 sessions will be dedicated to user experience during MIX08. It's so exciting to consider what Lou Carbone, Dave Armano, Dan Roam and the speakers from Adaptive Path are going to present. Microsoft is also going to talk about the evolution of the ribbon in Office.

Louis P. Carbone is a great speaker, and the line up will be fun. Hope to see everyone there.

MIX08 Registration Open

Leon Brown — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 04:13:00 GMT

If last year is any indication, this year will sell out fast. MIX08 is Microsoft's annual conference where get together to talk about our web technologies and products, user experience and how to work with and partner with Microsoft. Happening in the U.S.A. in Las Vegas, Nevada, this year's event will take place on 5-7 March, 2008 and will be quite educational and fun. For information on this year's sessions, speakers and events visit the MIX08 site.