Nigel Parker's Outside Line : MIX09

Mix09 Keynote Video Shown At Auckland Web Meetup

nparker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:10:00 GMT

As promised here is the MIX09 Keynote Highlight video that I showed at the Auckland Web Meetup

Download links of the different bits (including SuperPreview) are available on my previous post

John has also made a video introducing the speakers for the upcoming Web09 conference in Auckland that will feature Tim Heuer, Corrina Black and Arturo Toledo for Microsoft U.S.A
WEB09 PRESENTS from John Ballinger on Vimeo.

Internet Explorer 8 Released, IE6 down 8.8% in NZ in 8 Months.

nparker — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:35:00 GMT

Do you remember what you were doing when the planes hit the buildings in New York, September 11th 2001?

Did you know that two weeks before that event IE6 was released to the web?

What else was happening around that time?

Trade Me had less than 30,000 customers
The first generation 5GB ipod was released
The PS1 had been for sale for almost a year
Gladiator was named Best Picture
Russell Crowe won best actor
A patent describing the Google PageRank mechanism was granted.

It seems like ages ago doesn’t it? Seven and a half years after IE6 we have released Internet Explorer 8!

I previous blogged about the custom version of IE8 that Yellow created for their customers.

Since then Keith at markerstudio has shared a bit more info about the project. Of particular interest to me are these two comments:

The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!

I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior [to Google] in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.

It is a shame technical capability doesn’t = customer brand perception in relation to search but I guess that it is simply a commercial reality.

Who else has released a custom version of IE8 in the New Zealand market?

Like Yellow, YahooXtra has a targeted promotion of their custom version of IE8 on the front page of their site. Interestingly they have chosen not to created a 64-bit version, I guess not that many of their target users have >= 4GB of RAM on their machines.

That leads me to msn.co.nz who are disappointingly absent with their custom version today. Australia has their version out but NZ is still two weeks away from launch due to last minute adjustments to ensure local relevance.

~~Visiting the~~ ~~msn NZ custom version page~~ ~~gives you a “coming soon” message.~~

Update: The MSN New Zealand custom version of IE8 is now available for 32 Bit Vista and XP users by visiting http://tr.im/msnie8.

If you are interested in publishing add-ons for Internet Explorer you can do so by creating an account at http://ieaddons.com and clicking on your account to upload. Unfortunately there isn’t a market specifically for NZ so you will need to choose US or UK to publish your work to.

I noticed that Yellow Search (from their custom IE8 version) is now published and available in the gallery.

Touching on the brand perception of Google for search in New Zealand the same is true for Internet Explorer when it comes to using the Internet. Many New Zealander’s still think of the Internet as a “blue e on their desktop”, the particular version is somewhat irrelevant to most. The problem here is that if users don’t upgrade web developers around the world spend more and more time hitting their heads against the wall.

Over the last few months web developers at some of New Zealand's largest corporates tell me that their IT departments still deploy new desktop computers with standardised builds of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6! This continues to concern me and I am talking with Microsoft account managers to see how we can change this.

Eight months ago we started our process to Get rid of IE6 in New Zealand, now it is time to once again check in on how we are doing?

The good news is that we removed 8.76% of Internet Explorer 6 from New Zealand forever! The bad news is that IE6 still makes up 13.6% of New Zealand web users.

Further more we are now making it far easier to test your web applications on IE6 without actually needing to have IE6 installed.

At MIX09 last we we announced “SuperPreview”

Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your Web sites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

Below is a list of all of the MIX09 sessions on Internet Explorer:

Intergen, Buttercups and Silverlight Accessibility.

nparker — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:29:34 GMT

It seems fitting with Coldplay being in Auckland last week and Yellow producing a custom version of IE8 that we continue the Yellow theme.

Back in December 2006 Forrester released a report titled Smackdown: Rich Internet Applications Versus HTML

We found that, on average, RIAs outperform HTML interfaces; at the same time, RIA usability can fall prey to basic design mistakes.

The view that RIA’s are not accessible has continued for some but the W3C is working to change this with the introduction of the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)

From the early stages of development of IE8 the team have worked closely with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative group and Assistive Technology Vendors (ATVs). IE8 shipped with a bunch of new Accessibility Features including ARIA support.

So now that IE8 is supporting ARIA what does this mean for developers that are looking at building RIA’s using technologies like Silverlight and Flash and want to ensure that they are accessible as well?

Silverlight contains a number of accessibility features but there are few examples where these had been used to create a reference application so Microsoft approached Intergen who worked closely with The Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind to build one.

ButtercupReader - is a showcase of how Silverlight 2 can be used to build an application that blind and partially sighted folks can use to read digital books (DAISY 3.0 formatted books that is).

Andrew Tokeley does a fantastic job of explaining this project in detail on his blog.

Chris Auld and Reed Shaffner presented this project during a mini-breakout at MIX09 last week. If you are interested in more context for this project I recommend that you download and watch their half hour presentation Building Accessible RIAs in Microsoft Silverlight.

If you are wondering how to create DIASY content Reed has previously been involved in a project to build an Open XML to DAISY translator.

MIX09 Sessions Available Now!

nparker — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:44:08 GMT

Take a trip over to http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09 and you can watch and download the 122 sessions below:

MIX09 Day 1 Keynote

nparker — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 01:06:50 GMT

I woke up super early this morning and watched the MIX keynote live (Here are my live tweets). I must say even though I knew a lot of what was coming it was great to see it all presented together.

You can watch the keynote on demand below (the download links aren’t live just yet).

Tim Sneath has the best live blog of the keynote that I can find so why re-invent the wheel I say!

Tim Heuer has also blogged A guide to Silverlight 3 new features

Ben Waggoner has blogged: Silverlight 3 Beta - What's New for Media

The Big News Tickets for me so far are:

The SilverStripe Story (mainly because I worked on it)
The new IIS Media Services specifically Live Smooth Streaming
SuperPreview (view in IE6 without IE6 installed ;)
SketchFlow in Blend 3
The release of Silverlight 3 beta and the Blend 3 Beta at http://tr.im/sl3beta

Press Release

Microsoft Web Technologies Unveiled at MIX09 Help Businesses Deliver Return on Experience

White Paper

Windows Azure White Paper

Fact Sheets

Silverlight 3 Beta Fact Sheet

Azure Services Platform

Windows Azure Fact Sheet

Quote Sheet

Silverlight Customer Reference and Quote Sheet

SilverStripe = FREE, the MIX09 Keynote

nparker — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 06:53:00 GMT

The more time I spend with the Web community in New Zealand, the more time I also spend with people and companies utilising the open source business model.

That might sound like an oxymoron to some but my experience is that developers generally open source their software to obtain reach and build lucrative service contracts.

More than two years ago Chris Anderson proposed a new law that he calls The Andersen Switch:

In the analog-to-digital conversion things that are paid will become free and vice versa.

He followed it up with a new book titled FREE. You can read Chris’ wired article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business and his podcast on econtalk early last year. Just this week Chris Anderson and Guy Kawasaki keynoted the SXSW interactive stream “Anderson Gives Away the Free”.

Now the “FREE”- services driven, Ad funded or acquisition business models have been around for some time, but I have noticed much more high level conversations about these things recently given the challenging business environment that we are all experiencing at present.

Incidentally Microsoft has been offering free express versions of our popular development technologies for quite some time (see my blog post from 4 years ago).

Recently this has been enhanced with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer for installing all the FREE web development and deployment tools onto Windows. Version one of the WebPI received 350,000 in the first six weeks despite not being advertised anywhere.

Couple this with recent initiatives to get all of our software into the hands of students and start-up’s for no money up front and we are seeing a new wave of tech savvy entrepreneurs building on our stack. In fact the two finalists in the soon to air Start-UP TV series were both built on .NET.

That leads me onto the point of this whole blog post.

I think there is still a feeling out there that although Microsoft may offer FREE product we still don’t get Open Source. O’Rly?

This morning during the MIX09 keynote in Las Vegas, Scott Guthrie announced and presented the new version of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta and the Windows Web App Gallery that includes ten of the most popular Open Source web applications from around the world (SilverStripe, WordPress, Acquai Drupal, Gallery 2, DotNetNuke, SubText, DasBlog, Umbarco, ScrewTurn and BlogEngine.NET).

The inclusion of Wellington based SilverStripe is a big deal that SilverStripe and Microsoft have been working on for some time READ THE CASE STUDY. Anyone wanting to create a new Silverlight CMS project on Windows can now have it up and running in minutes without anything (except MySQL) previously installed!

Read about the install process on the SilverStripe blog.

So how did this happen?

Last July I spent a day at the Open Source Lab at Microsoft in the USA. Here I met Hank Janssen and Michael Joffe, and we started talking about working with PHP developers, the SQL Server Driver for PHP that his team had written and an update on running PHP applications on Windows.

Over the last year the Microsoft Open Source team have worked and contributed code to the communities that create some of the most popular open source applications in the world. This effort has culminated in an ambitious project that makes it easy for you to install your favourite “FREE” web applications and get them working on Windows and IIS.

Interesting enough not all of these applications are PHP based, included is DotNetNuke, a .NET CMS with more than 6 million downloads and 675,000 active members. NZ has a busy DotNetNuke community including http://www.autotrader.co.nz, http://nzrugby.co.nz and http://3news.co.nz.

This got me thinking of who in New Zealand would be a good candidate to engage with the Microsoft Open Source Labs to be added to the next group of Web Application Partners? How about Siggy and the SilverStripe team?

SilverStripe won the NZ Open Source award for Best Open Source Software Project of 2008 followed by SilverStripe winning the 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS in the Packt UK awards.

In a computerworld article Siggy suggested that

A likely contributing factor to winning the award was the company’s big win earlier this year: the CMS system was selected by the US Democratic Party as the platform for its pre-election conference, the Democratic National Convention 2008.

The site featured live video and up-to-date coverage of transcripts, photos and announcements. A team of 20 people was updating the site, and the SilverStripe support team was on duty 24/7 over the week the conference was held, says Magnusson.

A component of the site was streaming video content using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Silverlight was chosen by the Democratic Party because of the high-quality video it allows, says Magnusson. Over 350,000 hours of video was watched during the four days, he says.

Also there was press from Microsoft about this site.

Driven by my efforts to connect both sides, in August last year SilverStripe and Microsoft entered into a PHP on Windows Joint Development Program to get SilverStripe fully supported on Windows and part of the next iteration of the new Web Platform Installer.

Why would SilverStripe care about Windows you may ask?

Siggy wrote:

The fact that nearly 40% of installations go on Windows was one reason we added IIS 7.0 support in SilverStripe 2.3.0. It also means we'll continue to make Windows installs easier in the future.

The first challenge was to get Microsoft Software into SilverStripe’s hand. They hadn’t tested or developed on our platform before so they would need access to copies of Windows Server and SQL Server. Timing was great as we had just launched BizSpark in New Zealand so we signed the SilverStripe product up for that.

As part of the JDP, Microsoft technical support was available free of charge to SilverStripe from the US and Germany, but as the project progressed the talented and helpful Jorke Odolphi (Microsoft Australian Web Infrastructure Advisor), jumped into help SilverStripe, lead by Sam Minnée, with their testing and deployment.

SilverStripe incorporated some of the recent IIS7 enhancements features like URL Rewrite in their Windows Server 2008 solution. When it became clear that many of their community were using Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, access to expert Microsoft technical staff enabled SilverStripe developers to determine the best way to achieve IIS 6 compatibility and update the core product accordingly in record time.

The final touch was to deploy some live development servers to test SilverStripe running on the new supported server configurations.

Nathan Mercer and I have been working on an ambitious wee project to get New Zealand Hyper-V hosted virtual Windows servers into the hands of enterprising kiwi developers and it pros wanting to test their solutions on the new stuff FREE of charge.

We partnered with Peter Mott and his fantastic setup over at Swizzle (if you are looking for a NZ based virtual servers Peter provided a great service IMO). Along with top of the line HP Server kit to set up the dev server environment.

The first thirty servers have just been deployed to support all the teams in this years Imagine Cup competition and a couple of test servers for SilverStripe (Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2). If you are working on a project using the latest stuff that could really use a live development server, please drop me a line describing what you are trying to achieve and I’ll see if I can help you out.

If nothing else what I have learnt most from this project is that there are plenty of opportunities for Open Source companies to work with Microsoft to the mutual benefit of both organisations.

If you are a PHP developer thinking of targeting Windows today we have just made available the first release candidate of the PHP on Windows Training Kit.

The PHP on Windows Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including demos and hands-on labs to help you understand how to build PHP applications using Windows, IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008.

All that is left now is to drop Steve Osborn a line at Gen-i and tell him why Microsoft is good for Open Source in New Zealand :)

According to Osborn, however, New Zealand remains something of a Microsoft shop. This means there is not yet a huge core of talent at the right levels supporting open source around the country. This is likely to change, though, as technology moves forward. The Novell teaming agreement with Microsoft was possibly the single biggest step towards opening up the market.

There is an interesting discussion going on over on Rowan Simpson’s blog where he states that “There is No Depression in New Zealand Yet”.

Whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, it’s difficult to disagree that this is a horrible mess.

So, what are we going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

Do you feel like there is anything you can do, or is this something that they have to solve? And, if so, who is “they“?

Hopefully our ideas and our actions are leading to the change that is necessary to support our industry in these challenging times.

In conclusion some of the business models that Microsoft is pioneering align very nicely to the open source business models. These times are conducive to ensuring you capitalise on those investments that you have already made and ensure that they are leveraged well in future projects that you take on.