Jaime Rodriguez : MIX09

Robby Ingebretsen’s design for developers MIX09 workshop now online..

jaimer — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:26:00 GMT

The MIX09 team just posted Robby Ingebretsen’s: “Design for developers” workshop.

Robby knocked it out of the ball park with his workshop.
This is a must watch (multiple times) for most developers wanting to understand design.
I hope you enjoy it as much as every attendee did. Click on the image on the right to go to MIX site and watch.

We posted three videos as an asx. If you want to download, here are direct links:
    Part One: Process
    Part Two: Composition
    Part Three: Visuals

Enjoy!!

A few comments or disclaimers around workshops:
The workshops and pre-cons are not posted online because they cost extra. So for other conferences, please do not expect this.
In this case, workshops were recorded to test the cameras and accidentally posted on-line earlier, but encoding was not good; we heard from lots of people that they wanted to watch it, including people who had paid to attend; when we asked those that paid if it was OK to post for everyone they agreed, so thank them for it, but again, don’t assume this will repeat again (it is not up-to-me).

What about the other workshops?
Hiking Mt. Avalon (my workshop) should be posted next. The Mix online guys are doing this one at a time so they can say I owe them four favors instead of one; either that or it takes a day to encode and they are working on it.
We are looking at the other workshops to see if the quality is good enough. I can’t promise any other workshops yet; I do know that Molly’s workshop was not recorded.

MIX09 recap series part3, The Microsoft Client Continuum

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:33:00 GMT

In part 2 of the series, I explained the different target scenarios for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

I think at MIX09, we could have emphasized a bit more strongly our Microsoft Client Continuum. We demonstrated it a lot, but maybe did not take time to explain it, or explicitly call it, so I wonder if every one knows about it externally?

The “Microsoft Client Continuum” is our mission to empower you to create the Best User Experiences across all your customer’s touch points.

Today, you can reach customers on a web application (RIA), on Windows, on Surface, on Mobile devices, etc.
On part 2 of this series, I explained that one single run-time is likely not flexible enough to address the conflicting requirements (size vs. features, or full-trust vs. sandboxed) from all scenarios; if you want to provide the absolutely best experience across multiple touch points, you will likely end up at least compiling the application twice or having small optimizations for each touch point; this is where the Microsoft Client Continuum offers some significant advantages over other solutions.

The client continuum uses .NET as the single skill, single toolset needed to create immersive client applications.

The continuum facilitates great User Experiences with tools that empower both designers and developers; these tools share a common declarative languages to represent UI and interactions.

The continuum thrives on reuse: skills reuse, tools reuse, and code reuse.

At MIX09, on the Silverlight and WPF front, we demonstrated the continuum a lot:

In Scott’s keynote, we showed an application we had used at a previous MIX to show hardware accelerated video and HLSL effects.
We showed it last year for WPF, and this year for Silverlight. The codebase was pretty much the same.
Jeff Wilcox had a session on “Sharing tools, skills and code in Silverlight and WPF”.
Karen Corby’s session on “Building Silverlight controls”, showed the same control she created in Silverlight running on WPF.
Our Expression Blend team, kept saying in all of their sessions, “all of these features work equally well in Silverlight and WPF”
Laurent Bugnion, from IdentityMine had a session called “Working across the .NET continuum”
Today, David Anson blogged how the Silverlight control Toolkit charts controls run fine on WPF.
Earlier today, I posted the same library of HLSL effects we use in WPF running in Silverlight

There were plenty other demonstrations of the continuum in action, and there are plenty more to come. One part that I really enjoyed at MIX was talking to a lot of customers, and partners, who are writing apps that span across the continuum.

For those wondering about the choice between WPF and Silverlight, keep the continuum in mind and rest assured you are not making the wrong decision with either technology.

For developers and designers, learning our continuum technologies is a great investment; you learn XAML and the tools once and you can reuse it across mobile, desktop, RIA, and Surface applications.
For businesses, you can prioritize for what you need today (desktop or RIA) and later on create the appropriate companion. Your skills, tools and code investments are preserved.

A few disclaimers on status today and future for the Continuum:

We are not done with the Continuum. If you want to share code, do plan ahead; be aware of the current platform differences, expect those to decrease quickly but don’t expect them to go away 100%, Silverlight will likely stay a subset of WPF (to keep it small and RIA optimized). MIX09 was a great step in the right direction, there are plenty of new features in SL3 that make the compatibility with WPF higher.
There will be more convergence on both sides. Both WPF and Silverlight will continue to grow and innovate on their scenarios, but on each release, each run-time should also pickup features that the other run-time added. WPF will pick up Silverlight features (like VSM or controls) and Silverlight will continue to add features from WPF.

Closing the series:
I think MIX09 was a great conference! The features and products announced are very exciting. Microsoft demonstrated strong innovation and adoption on the RIA space, and a strong commitment to User Experience and designer tools. Because MIX09 is a web conference, we shared our web message and this likely confused attendees on our commitment for WPF; the reality is that we are equally committed to WPF and Silverlight, because we need both technologies to deliver on our Client Continuum.

MIX09 Recap series part2 , what about WPF

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:10:00 GMT

In between all the positive feedback at MIX, there was a lingering question that I read a lot on twits, blog posts, and heard at the Q&A from some sessions and I think we missed it during our planning; I felt it is one of those “we can not see the forest cause the trees are on the way” mistakes. Do you know what the question is??

Yes, it is “With Silverlight out of the browser, is WPF dead?” ..

Here is my personal take as a person who spends a lot of time with both of these teams and with customers using the technologies ( very often at the same time):

WPF and Silverlight address different scenarios and though they look alike, it is unlikely that in the short-term, one replaces the other.

The long answer is that the scenarios each technology addresses are different enough that they have conflictive requirements.
I see the choice between these two platforms as a trade-off between:

Size vs. Features
Full-trust (with native interop) vs. Secured or Sandboxed

Expanding even further:

Silverlight addresses our RIA needs. A good Rich Internet Application (RIA)run-time needs to be:

Cross-platform. This likely means the frameworks can’t become too exploitive of OS specific features and can’t integrate that well with the host OS. It is a lot of work to create a comprehensive application framework (like .NET) for cross-platform.
Easy to deploy and small in size. Web technology needs to install quickly, and with no risk of disrupting the desktop. When it comes to RIA frameworks, the trade-off between features and size is very tough. Compromises must be made when necessary (backing up my point that the framework is unlikely a full-desktop application replacement due to the size constraint).
Secured (or better yet, sandboxed). Internet software can’t be easily trusted because today there is no easy way to assign different trust levels across the internet. It is better to run sand-boxed so users are safe, than to put desktop at risk, so most RIA software is therefore sandboxed. This is critical to the success of RIAs!
You can ignore it and get lucky (for a little while) but I think it will eventually bite those that do ignore it. Microsoft has learned that lesson before, and we are not looking to compromise that again (ever?).
Faster and richer than any thing standards and web-based software (else why use it?).

WPF addresses our Windows (desktop) application needs. A good desktop application needs to be:

Exploitive. If it runs on a single OS, it better take advantage of it. Features like desktop and shell integration, drag & drop, hardware acceleration, etc. If the software runs on a platform that supports extended features like touch (in Windows7 or Surface), the app should embrace and support the features.
Comprehensive and Powerful. If the run-time is installed once, there is no reason for it not to be a full framework ( full 3D, media, documents, accessibility, storage and databases, a complete end-to-end framework that is not constrained by size).
Trusted, verifiable, and secured. If some one is installing software in their desktop, they should verify who it came from and then (if needed) trust it to do its job. If the application needs access to file system, devices, secure stores, sockets, etc. this is the choice you make at install time; the goal is to trust the application to do its job. You installed the client run-time for that reason. If needed, the run-time can do work to ‘constrain’ the application’s permissions (like Partial Trust). Apps should explicitly declare intent and the permissions they require to run.
Easy to deploy/Easy to update/configurable. I am not aiming for <30 seconds and < 5 MB download like a RIA run-time, but I have to admit Microsoft needs improvements on this. I am optimistic here:
- We recently added .NET 3.5 SP1 to Windows Update and hope that over time we get the majority of Windows boxes to 3.5 SP1.
- With .NET4 we deliver on the vision for client profile. It will be a 22 MB download, that runs side-by-side with all the other versions of .NET framework, so we will be able to use it on any box (not just clean XP like we have in Client profile with 3.5 SP1).
  I hope the two combined get us to desktop ubiquity so people can plan a .NET app with out worries about how to install the run-time.
Manageable. When we are talking desktop/enterprise software we quickly get into thousands of users, controlled versioning, policies, software is centrally distributed , etc.. Desktop software that is installed is easy to manage. RIA software that can be in caches, user stores, etc. is a bit harder.

Once you look at the above, it is easy to grasp why today, we do need multiple technologies to address both scenarios. Any one that tells you otherwise is heavily short changing you in one of these two scenarios (usually the desktop).

We do need to acknowledge that RIAs need stickiness, and off-line launching, and that is why Silverlight Out Of Browser was created, I call this scenario the “off-line RIA”; and it is very, very different from the “full-trust desktop app”.

Three more reasons to explain why WPF will be around for a long while:

WPF adoption is going well. We have a lot of partners doing WPF. If you went to PDC, we did a video with just a few of the partners doing WPF, it included Lenovo, HP, AMD, Autodesk, T-Online, Disney, Blockbuster, Roxio, SNCF, SAP, Terra, Cewe, and many others. These are the types of partners that use WPF to connect with millions of users. We have equal number of successes in the enterprise with partners who buy lots of Windows licenses and are very important to Microsoft. We are not walking away from that any time soon.

Inside Microsoft adoption is also strong; we see our business platform – the Dynamics team- using it; we have consumer apps like LifeCam and SongSmith, we have office apps like Semblio, our internal IT teams are using it, and our own development division is betting heavily on WPF to create Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend.

Announcement: Starting next Tuesday (seems like a good day for recurrent series) I will try to start a new “blog series” similar to Tim Sneath’s “Great WPF applications” series; I am not as eloquent as Tim, but I am happy to keep you on the loop on some of the great WPF apps out there. I don’t think we do enough of sharing those successes(again, trees blocking the forest).

We are investing into the platform. You did not see that at MIX because most of the announcements were at PDC and we are now in the middle of the .NET 4 release, but you can watch Kevin Gjertadt’s MIX session and hopefully get the message that:
- WPF will make the most important developer features in Windows 7 accessible to .NET developers. We are talking Touch!! that is not a small feature. We also have ribbon, taskbar, etc.
- We continue to improve the fundamentals. Performance and Text are good examples of significant investments in the .NET 4 time-frame.
- We thrive to improve deployment so every one can get full .NET Framework applications with much less friction. Details above.
WPF is the recommended UI stack in the .NET framework. There are a lot of people that need the full framework for their applications (Workflow, advanced Web services, encrypted stores, Office integration, parallelism, MEF, etc.) Silverlight is a high-fidelity subset of the framework, and it serves quite well all RIA needs, but we can’t cram the rest of the framework into Silverlight.

In closing, WPF will be around a while. One size does not fit all, today.

It is fair for MIX attendees to wonder about which one to choose, but that is mostly because MIX is a web conference. These attendees do need off-line, sandboxed RIAs and I am totally psyched that we are able to meet their needs.
For the other customers that need desktop applications that call native Win32 code, access to devices, or integration with desktop and office, then those customers will be able to use WPF.

The story on the WPF and Silverlight convergence is actually much better than this post discusses because here I aimed at explaining the different scenarios each addresses; stay tuned for Part 3 to discuss the synergies amongst Silverlight and WPF.

MIX09 recap series part 1, favorite features and announcements

jaimer — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:51:00 GMT

I am finally caught up with my family and work stuff , so I want to share my belated recap and my lessons learned from observing and talking to people at MIX09. Since it is a lot, I partitioned it into three posts:

Part1: Anything that inspired or excited me.
Part2: What we could have done (or messaged) better; future for our desktop client.
Part3: Our mission on the client space: The Microsoft Client Continuum.

Part 1: The good (or great)!

IMO, this was the best MIX to date. Microsoft was finally able to demonstrate and deliver the vision we have been thriving for in the last few years:

User Experience and designers were embraced throughout the conference (in part, by credible, recognized thought leaders from Microsoft).
- Bill Buxton and Deborah Adler keynotes were great.
- Expression Blend announced their upcoming features, with disruptive, rapid prototyping features like sketch flow, and strong improvements to the fundamentals with behaviors, design-time data, better import tools, and source control.
Internet Explorer 8 is a strong return back to the web standards world. It is compliant, more secure, fast enough, and innovative: IE8 brings safety and productivity to its users. I think we are back in the game (and just on time).
Silverlight 3 came really strong on all angles:
- We continue to innovate and lead on media.
- We are moving at warp speed to catch up to WPF around fundamentals (like element to element data binding, resources, etc.)
- We are moving towards the enterprise and already have a great set of features planned for the .NET RIA Services; this is the beginning of a great business platform.
- To every one’s surprise, we let the cat out of the browser (literally!)

My favorite features announced through out the conference:

Blend behaviors – yes, I know this is not even a new technology feature (we have been able to do them for a while) but I think official support in the tools and pre-canned behaviors in the platform will change how designers create interactivity in applications. Blend behaviors makes designers more productive and empowers them to do all the things that make me “miss” Triggers when I work on Silverlight. So I am psyched about behaviors.
To get familiar with behaviors you should:

Watch Pete Blois’ 20 minute session at MIX.
Look at the sample behaviors that Pete has released at Expression’s gallery.
Check out Kirupa’s walkthrough on behaviors.

Sketchflow – has the potential to change conceptual design and end-to-end designer workflow.
I like the direction on which this is going because it enabled rapid prototyping and potential reuse of these prototypes in the real app.

To get familiar with sketchflow, you must:
- Watch Christian Schormann’s Sketchflow session.
- Wait until ? for us to ship the preview. Sorry!
All the Silverlight improvements to get parity with WPF: Official support for Resource Dictionaries, Styling improvements, Element to Element binding, etc. I must say these are probably not crowd favorites either, but they are dear to me because I do write code that goes across both platforms, or often I find myself “missing” a feature that was not there in Silverlight; feature parity between both run-times makes it easier to port code and makes Silverlight better (against other competitors) so it helps us increase our user base.

To get familiar with these improvements, you need to
- Watch Joe Stegman’s “what’s new in SL3 features” session
- Watch Karen Corby’s session on controls.
H.264 Media on Silverlight
This one is big because it allows us to better serve content providers that had H264 format (mostly due to mobile) so I had to list, but I have mixed feelings here, I still hear ( and can see from videos I get ) that VC-1 is a better format. Still I am very excited about the possibilities these offers for us to work with new partners!

Don’t get me wrong, I was psyched about a lot more features than I mention above, but I had to pick a few top ones. If you want the list of other features that really excited me:

Silverlight Out of Browser – is very exciting, but I need to see what people do with it. I have to say it has the potential to be game changing in the long-run (as we grow it). I will come back to this one in part2 of the series stay tuned for that.
New import features in Blend. Being able to import Photoshop and illustrator sounds very, very good. I still need to capture feedback from partners on how good it is; if the quality is good, then this will also be game changing.
Perspective 3D in Silverlight. I am still curious where people take this feature too. I am sure it will be some where great and I will be looking silly for not saying it was game changing ;)

OK. that is a very high level of all the “Good stuff” .. I do have to give a “Thank You!” shout to the audience and partners that attended. For me and lots of other Microsoft folks, a huge part of MIX are the hallway and meals or party conversations. It is great to hear what we are doing right, wrong, and what we should do next.

I also have to throw a shout to the Deborah Adler keynote slot. What an inspiring story.

Stay tuned for part 2 and part 3 in the series!

Hiking Mt. Avalon at MIX09…

jaimer — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:15:20 GMT

Planning for our WPF workshop at MIX 09 is already in full swing at hour 2… and I am psyched about the speakers we’ve already recruited: John Gossman (WPF and Silverlight architect) and Jonathan Russ (Identitymine rock star developer and exWPF team member from the Avalon days).

We now have the authorities on architecture (john), developers (jonathan), designer/integrator (robby), and getting drinks (jaime) covered. We hope to have another designer confirmed by end of the week.

On agenda, we have to complete the team before we commit, but in case you need to change your reservations or register for the session, here is a quick draft from a 30 minute lunch w/ Robby. Expect it to grow!

The four ‘axes’ into the hike are going to be: Guidance, Tips, Patterns, and Collab…

If you are coming, or have advise on a tough WPF topic, please let us know what we absolutely must cover…

While I am hyping our session, I should also share that the morning workshops are very, very good. Robby has a ‘Design fundamentals for developers’ and Adam Kinney has a ‘Rosetta Stone, from Flash to XAML’ session.

Don’t miss out!! If you need to convince your boss to let you come, tell him this is going to save you days (or weeks) later in your project; we hope to give you the map to the mountain (and share the best tips & tricks)..

C U @Mix09..