View MIX09 sessions all online!

john.mullinax — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 03:10:51 GMT

Thanks to the MIX team for getting a nice, organized list of all the MIX09 session videos up – complete with multiple video formats, as well as slides!

http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/All

Not as good as being there, but essentially great, free training!

Naturally, the keynotes are definitely worth seeing, and also, I like this session on the Windows Live Messenger Toolkit. It does a nice job showing examples of how Live Services can make your site more social and engaging, and also how easy it is to get started.

Unlike the Live Framework/Mesh part of Live Services – which is extremely cool in its own right, but still in CTP and not yet ready for production use -- everything Chris Parker from the Windows Live team shows in this session is ready to go into production on your site today.

The screen shot above is from the last demo in the video – it shows Chris picking an item from a list, dragging it over and dropping it on one of his Windows Live Messenger contacts, and that kicking of an IM to the user with a link to the item he picked from the list. Basically, a free and easy way to add real time collaboration to your web site! Very cool.

Equally cool, Live Services lets people leverage their existing social network and social capabilities (via Windows Live infrastructure) on your site instead of asking them to invest in creating yet another collection of friends. I believe this is important because, frankly, I’m sensing some “social networking fatigue” – users like social capabilities, but they don’t especially like the proliferation of their data and fragmentation of their social experiences online. In other words, allowing users to leverage their existing social networks contributes to a thoughtful consumer experience.

As a bonus for site owners, helping people connect with their networks on your site makes it easier for them to share your site with their friends – which helps drive both more traffic and more time on site.

Learn more about Live Services in general at dev.live.com, and more specifically about leveraging Messenger in your site here.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: MIX,Free Learning,Live Services,Messenger,Windows Live,Social

Amazing Day 1 Keynote at MIX!

john.mullinax — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:28:29 GMT

Wow -- so much at MIX I can't possibly do it justice right now, but check out the summary here. Really, really amazing stuff and some super announcements. Just a teaser:

Silverlight for Mobile devices -- and not just windows mobile but Nokia Symbian, too. Use common skills for rich media apps everywhere.
IE8 -- and true standards compliant browsing. Especially check out Activities and Web Slices in the keynote
Preview of the NBC Olympics site, based on Silverlight -- the most ambitious web media project ever.
Silverlight AOL email client -- showing off personalization and huge performance benefits of Silverlight over AJAX (conservatively, 2-3x in this case)
Announcement of new WPF physics engine and controls coming soon
A fantastic automotive B2C web site for Aston Martin -- with tie-ins to a UMPC WPF smart client guided selling in the dealership

See the video stream here.

Technorati Tags: MIX,wpf,silverlight,silverlight mobile

Beyond | IT : MIX

View MIX09 sessions all online!

Amazing Day 1 Keynote at MIX!