Me about things...

Interview with team KCL, winners of the UK Imagine Cup

2009-07-02T09:43:44Z

Some days ago I had an opportunity to have a chat with Christian and Iulian, the two members of the team KCL from Kings College in London who created a system called Pioneer which aims to reduce pollution in large cities by reducing traffic congestion.

You can find the video they submitted for the Imagine Cup final (and also vote for their entry if you like) here:

http://peopleschoice.imaginecup.com/default.aspx

I really like their work and their project, and wanted to publish some of the questions I asked them.

Q: What is the problem you’re solving and why did you choose it?

The problem we tackled is air pollution in large cities. As we are students living in London, we are directly confronted with this problem. This is why we saw how urgent it is.

Q: That sounds like a tough task, so how exactly did you solve it?

Well, first of all, we had to find out why big cities are so polluted. We found statistics from Greenpeace saying that more than 80% of urban pollution is caused by cars. And in particular, the pollution comes from traffic congestion.
Our solution aims to minimize traffic congestion through a central car routing system. By minimizing traffic congestion we could decrease air pollution significantly!

Q: That sounds interesting, so how exactly would such a routing system look like?

Basically, you have to think of it like a navigation system in your car. From a users perspective it looks the same way as other navigation systems look like. But on conventional navigation systems, routes are calculated on your small device, where our solution is based on a server that knows the position of all cars at any time. Based on that information, the server calculates your optimal route and sends it to your device.

Q: So, on the bottom line, the user will get a route that avoids heavy traffic and therefore he saves time, fuel and the environment?

That’s right, but that’s not everything: After we did first simulations, even we were surprised how efficient pioneer is, so we went even further by taking traffic lights into account. Pioneer is now a platform for the future city. It is able to switch traffic lights according to real time traffic data, which decreases congestion even more.

Q: That sounds brilliant, but can you give any numbers? For instance, by how much do you reduce traffic congestion?

Yes, we implemented a simulation module that gives some numbers. The average person drives the car 76 minutes every day. Our simulations show that with pioneer, everyone can save up to 10% of this time.

Q: And do you have any plans with pioneer for the future?

Oh yes, indeed we have big plans with pioneer. The next step is what we call the “Dynamic City”.

Q: What does that mean?

Let me explain it with an example: Imagine you are driving to work in the morning rush hour and you’re taking one of the major roads into the city centre. Your road has 5 lanes, two of them going into the city and 3 out of the city. Our system would change the direction of lanes according to the traffic needs. In this situation, it could would happen that the system automatically changes the road so that 4 lanes are going into the city. That would dramatically decrease congestion on that road.

Q: This is all good an well but… aren’t there already too many GPS navigation systems?

Absolutely. This is why our system is based on open APIs that 3rd party can use to leverage it. Companies like TomTom could tap into it to get routing information in real time and participate to reducing congestion.

Also, how many times did it happen to you to get in your car and not remembering the exact address you are going to, or not finding it on the map? The pioneer’s architecture allows to do some very nice things such as planning a route while sitting at your PC and send it to the mobile or GPS device making it easier to plan a trip without bad surprises.

Q: I know that planning routes taking in account real time traffic information is not a trivial problem.

Yes, and this is probably the biggest strength of our solution.

Conventional algorithms are far too slow for large numbers of queries on large graphs like the ones representing large cities.

Our solution have a pre-processing step which makes it efficient enough to serve hundreds of queries a second on even very large city graphs which allows us to make it possible to do real time routing so that we can include traffic data in the calculations.

The research paper describing the details of how this has been achieved will be published early next year.

Q: Wow, I think this idea has potential in the future. I wish you all the best and good luck! Before we close though, can you tell me how and why you decided to participate to the Imagine Cup?

We heard about the Imagine Cup last year and this year we decided to submit an entry because we though we had a good idea and a great technology. We also think it is a great opportunity for us to make a good experience on a real project which we could potentially turn in a real product and business. Last but not least we think it is a great opportunity for us to have something in our resume that will show our participation and commitment and that will surely be very interesting when we finish our studies and start looking for a job.

To learn more, go to the project website where the team will publish info about their work http://pioneer-routing.com/

A few Windows 7 RC tricks

2009-05-07T15:24:42Z

As many of you should already know, we recently released Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) for Technet, MSND, MSDN-AA first and for everybody else a bit later.

I installed it as soon as I could and have been playing around with it for a few days already and found a couple of things I thought I would share.

How to provide feedback

The Beta version of Windows 7 had a Send Feedback link in the title bar of every window and that is gone now. The reason why is because being an almost final version, we want to test the “real thing” and the link on the title bar is not intended to be there in the final release.

So what to do if you do want to provide feedback? Quite simple:

1. Click on the Start menu
2. type CMD and hit Enter (this will open a command window)
3. type “rundll32.exe FeedbackTool.dll,ShowWizard” and hit enter again

This will open the Send an Issue report screen that you can use to send your feedback:

You can also create a link on the desktop to point to the same:

Right click on the Desktop
Click New –> Shortcut
In the Type the location of the item enter “rundll32.exe FeedbackTool.dll,ShowWizard”, then click Next
Choose the name you prefer (I called it “Send Feedback”)
Click on Finish

Where are the nice backgrounds?

The release candidate shipped with a number of very cool backgrounds which are all available via the Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization applet.

Some of them are common for all installations and some are “localised”. So if you are in the UK you will see a United Kingdom section on top of the standard ones:

Now, what if you want to access the files? Easy, just open a Windows Explorer window and go to one of the following folders:

C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper

c:\windows\Globalization\MCT

(you need to type this address as the MCT folder itself is hidden and you cannot get there just browsing)

How can I create my own background slideshow?

One of the things I like most of Windows 7 is how easy it makes to customise your desktop and how it has a built in method of using a slideshow as desktop background.

But since I prefer to set up my own slideshow with some of my photos and some that were built in, how can I go about that?

Simple… create a folder somewhere (I did it in the picture folder) and call it something like “Desktop Backgrounds”. Put your own photos there (may be using also some of the built in ones discussed above).

Open the Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Desktop Background applet (right click on the Desktop, click on Personalize, click on Desktop background).

In the Choose your Desktop Background window click on Browse, select your newly created folder and you are all set.

Really easy but a great effect!!!

PHP on Windows Training Kit

2009-05-03T09:28:05Z

We just launched a the PHP on Windows Training Kit that developers can use to learn how to build PHP applications using Windows, IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008 taking full advantage of the platform.

The guide includes demos and hands-on labs covering several aspects of the various capabilities that the Winodws platform allows PHP developers to use such as:

PHP & SQL Server Demos

Integrating SQL Server Geo-Spatial with PHP
SQL Server Reporting Services and PHP

PHP & SQL Server Hands On Labs

Introduction to Using SQL Server with PHP
Using Full Text Search over Office Documents in PHP

PHP on Windows Hands On Labs

IIS Access Control Features for PHP
Using IIS 7.0 Media Features in a PHP Application
Troubleshooting PHP
Migrating PHP Applications to IIS 7.0

So, if you are a PHP developer and want to learn more about what the Windows Plaform offers you, go ahead and download the kit.

New Deep Zoom Composer supports DeepZoomPix

2009-04-20T13:32:53Z

The DeepZoom team just released an updated version of DeepZoom Composer which now supports native upload of your composition to the really cool DeepZoomPix (I blogged about DeepZoomPix a few days ago when it was launched).

The previous version of Composer allowed you to upload to another service called “PhotoZoom” which has now been replaced by the more powerful DeepZoomPix (and actually if you already uploaded any composition to PhotoZoom, you will find that they will be available and working great in DeepZoomPix).

Just one note… to install the new version you *MUST* uninstall the previous one first!

One caveat if you are planning to use it though: Please do note that DeepZoomPix is just a technology demo. It is something that we are only planning on keeping until the end of the year (Dec 31st), and after that, we are not sure what will happen to the service. Please do not use this location as a permanent storage location for your photos.

You can always take a look at how it has been created looking at the developer resources page and you can go to Codeplex to download the underlying framework that powers it: Jellyfish (which as I stated in my previous post is Open Sourced)

DeepZoomPix: bringing together Silverlight and Azure

2009-04-16T11:00:55Z

Have you ever wondered how Silverlight could take advantage of the Azure platform?

Well, we just released DeepZoomPix a fantastic photo sharing site that takes advantage of both these technologies to provide a truly innovative way of sharing your photos.

It uses DeepZoom to compose your photos into compositions that are then presented to the visitors in a very interactive way. All the images are stored in the Windows Azure Services Platform, specifically Windows Azure Storage.

The result can be shared with friends either sending a link or embedding it into a blog or webpage, the only requirement is to have the Silverlight plug in installed.

Here is a sample I created using photo from a recent visit to a Zoo near London:

Full details on how the site has been built are also available on the site if you are interested and think about doing something similar… and the good news is that the source code of Jellyfish, the framework created by 2nd Factory and used to create this, is released under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) on CodePlex!

Live Search and the April Fool’s Day

2009-04-01T14:32:59Z

Being April’s fool the Live Search team decided to join the party on their homepage. So if you go (quickly!!!) to the US version of Live Search clicking on the link below, you will find it has on the background the image of a “strange” animal:

http://www.live.com/?scope=web&mkt=en-US

It is a Jackalope and if you move the cursor on the Jackalope's nose you will see a little window describing it:

But the funniest part is the announcement hidden on the bottom left of the image:

Clicking on the link will take you to this page:

Of course… who else could it be?

Happy April Fool’s day!!!!

X48: Student games now available to download

2009-03-27T12:12:04Z

Last week at the University of Derby, we run X48, a marathon gamecamp where student and indie developers used Microsoft's XNA Game Studio 3.0 to create a game in less than 48 hours on the theme of Evolution.

Ed reported on the two days in this blog post and in a nutshell we had 80 students, more than 750 snacks, more than 550 drinks, 100,000 lines of code.

During the 2 days we and the students generated a lot of videos, photos and tweets which you can see here:

107 Videos and game demos http://vimeo.com/groups/x48
377 photos http://www.flickr.com/groups/1038141@N23/
A lot of tweets!!! http://search.twitter.com/search?q=x48

Most importantly, students were able to rise to the challenge and create fully functional games with XNA in less than 48 hours (more like 24 of actual development time). And they consumed a considerable amount of junk food and created a lot of code - http://www.daytum.com/x48

Now the games developed during the two days are available for download at the X48 website: http://www.x48gamecamp.com/games/

Go ahead, download a few, play them and let us know what you think!!!

Microsoft Surface: real design, development and use in education

2009-03-25T16:13:00Z

With all the buzz about Mix 09 last week, many may have missed that we just launched Microsoft Surface here in the UK.

Marc Holmes just posted a blog where he talks about the launch of Surface and the the media coverage that the event generated.

But the most interesting thing (for me at least) in the post is actually the video that has been shot at the Microsoft Technology Centre to document the process of designing and developing a very cool Surface application

Finguistic is a word-play application that the guys in the MTC put together with Research Machines and is designed to let kids build short sentences, spell words, etc by interacting with the Surface.

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This application (and a bunch of others) has then been used at the Churchend Primary School in Reading and we videoed the kids using it and the comments from some of the teachers… the result is simply amazing.

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I really think this is just the beginning of many applications we will see emerging using the cool technology and the innovative way it provides to interact with a PC.

If you are an academic in a UK University, College or design school and are interested in learning more about Surface and Surface development for your courses or research projects, please get in touch with me directly to have a chat about it.

Goblin XNA: A Platform for 3D Augmented and Virtual Reality Research and Education

2009-03-25T13:11:32Z

I just came across this project by the Columbia University Computer Graphics & User Interfaces Lab which I think is definitely worth looking at.

In their own words, Goblin XNA is a platform for research on 3D user interfaces, including mobile augmented reality and virtual reality, with an emphasis on games. It is written in C# and based on the Microsoft XNA platform.

One very cool project that have already been implemented with the platform are is the Goblin XNA AR Racing Game

It is an augmented reality mod of the XNA Racing Game Starter Kit.

It is the first game being created using Goblin XNA, and demonstrates the use of fiducial tracking, 2.5D and 3D widgets, and assorted 3D user interface techniques

The project has been supported by Microsoft Research and its source code can be downloaded from CodePlex.

This is a very interesting use of a technology that has been created to create games and is being used to do some very serious research.

Windows Azure Session in London

2009-03-24T14:32:26Z

You probably heard that we recently launched a Cloud Computing platform called Windows Azure. It is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform and allows software developers to create applications using .NET (and with the latest version of Azure PHP) and have them running in the cloud.

We arranged for a session session titled “Windows Azure Update, What it is & What it isn’t” where three members of the Azure team in Microsoft Corp will introduce the platform and have some Q&A with the participants.

There are still a few seats left so if you would like to attend this event please go to http://azureupdate.eventbrite.com/, sign up and if you have 2mins introduce yourself and say why you would like to attend

Please see agenda below along with speakers bio and registration details below:-

Agenda

6.15pm - 6.30pm             Arrive and Registration
6.30pm - 7:30pm             Azure Update “What it is & What it isn’t” + Q&A
7.30pm - 8:00                  UKAzurenet “Introduction”

8:00pm – 8.30 Food / drinks / Network

Matt Rogers (Senior Field Marketing Manager for Windows Azure)

In this role he is responsible for global go-to-market strategy, understanding customer needs for the new service, and preparing Microsoft's global sales force and partner community for the upcoming launch.

James Conard (Senior Director, Azure Services, .NET, and Visual Studio Evangelism)

James leads a global team of senior Microsoft evangelists who help customers realize the full potential of their IT investments using Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform, .NET Framework and Visual Studio. James and his team have worked with customers and Microsoft partners around the world in understanding how these Microsoft offerings reduce IT costs and project timelines while delivering innovation solutions to market.

Michael Maggs, Senior Director , Windows Azure Partner Marketing – Session Title

Michael is responsible for the global partner ecosystem of Windows Azure. He and his team work with leading system integrators, software development firms and IT consultancies to enable enterprises to adopt Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.

The Microsoft Translator web page widget

2009-03-20T12:35:31Z

Among a number of other things (especially the Silverlight 3 beta and the final version of Internet Explorer 8) at Mix 09 we announced that yet another very cool tool from Microsoft Research is being made available.

It is the Microsoft Translator web page widget. In a nutshell it is a widget that can be placed on a web page and allows users to automatically translate the content of any given page into any of the supported languages in place!!! This means that the page they are on will simply be rendered in the language they chose without the need of opening other tabs, new windows, pop ups, etc.

I just installed the widget on my page and you can see it on the right. I tested it with Italian and it does a fair job. Not perfect by any means but definitely good enough to get a good feeling of the page content.

Why don’t you try it out and let me know what you think?

At the moment you need an invite token to get hold of the widget (and these codes were distributed to Mix participants). You can register for an invite though and I hope more codes will be released soon.

In any case, to learn more just visit the team blog here.

Silverlight 3 Beta 1 now available (plus other stuff)

2009-03-18T18:31:44Z

Today at the MIX 09 conference we announced the immediate availability of the Silverlight 3 Beta 1 SDK.

First of all here are the all important URLs:

Developers Runtime:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=143433

Silverlight 3 Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=11dc7151-dbd6-4e39-878f-5081863cbb5d

Silverlight 3 SDK Beta 1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d09b6ecf-9a45-4d99-b752-2a330a937bc4!

Silverlight 3 Beta 1 Documentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838158(vs.96).aspx.

Blend 3 Preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/blendpreview

Microsoft .NET RIA Services March '09 Preview
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=76bb3a07-3846-4564-b0c3-27972bcaabce&displayLang=en

So what is in it?

This was highly expected and there is a lot of excitement about it so I thought it may be nice to list some of the new cool features included in this release:

1.	Support for Higher Quality Video & Audio
	Rich, high quality media has always been one of the strengths of Silverlight since version 1 (hence big the number of sites that adopted it as their technology of choice for video streaming), Silverlight V3 is still another step forward in this by providing a number of additional features.
	Support for native H.264 video and AAC audio compression Full screen 720p HD playback (thanks to its ability to leverage GPU HW acceleration) Full supports Smooth Streaming for almost instant playback and optimal bandwidth and CPU utilisation Extensible media format support thanks to the new RAW AV Pipeline using 3^rd party codecs Industry leading content rights protection using PlayReady technology

2	Enhanced visual experiences
	We listened to what developers and designers told us they wanted to see in the next version of Silverlight to allow them creating even more exciting user experiences and among the many additions to the platform are:
	Support for Perspective 3D Graphics which allows to apply content to a 3D plane that can be rotated or scaled in space without writing any additional code A lot of bitmap enhancement including Pixel Shader Effects, Bitmap Caching, new Bitmap APIs Themes support which will allow developers to apply styles to applications changing the way the app looks at runtime New animation effects such as spring and bounce and custom created ones which will allow developers to implement their own mathematical formula to describe an animation Improved text rendering which provides for better looking and faster font and text effects and animations Enhanced Controls Skinning which allows to sharing styles across different applications

3	Improved support for developers productivity
	While Silverlight has always provided excellent support for developers via the tight integration with Visual Studio and a set of built-in controls, the new version keep adding on top of this and provides yet more features that will make designers happy:
	60+ high-quality, fully skinnable and customizable out-of-the-box controls such as charting and media, new layout containers such as dock and viewbox, and controls such as autocomplete, treeview and datagrid… and did I mention dev will have access to the controls source code? Support for Deep linking which allows bookmarking a page within an app Improved support for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enhanced data support allowing things like: Element to Element binding (for example linking the volume in a media player to a slider) Data forms with data validation Support for client and server side business objects allowing for example paging, filtering and sorting of data which in conjunction with the new .NET RIA services will allow to perform complex operations against server side data

4	Out of browser capabilities
	You asked and we answered!!! Now it is possible to host Silverlight apps on the local machine and add a link to the desktop to launch the app outside of the browser and even if the machine is offline!
	Desktop shortcuts and start menu support –place an application on the desktop and be one click away from your customer. Run outside of browser –no longer need the distraction of the browser chrome Safe, secure, sandboxed – an application can be trusted without security warnings, keeping your customers safe. Consumer friendly non-administrator install – applications are held in a cache and do not require any privileges to run Built in auto-update – an application will check for new versions on the server and update on launch Connectivity detection (in browser, out of browser) – can detect a loss of connection and then chose to cache users work until the reconnect Windows 7 integration – on Windows 7 support will be provided for superbar integration, multitouch, and location awareness services such as GPS support so that your application can react to the users location eg for mapping or location targeted information.

Designers, designers, designers!!!

And what about designers? While Silverlight has always been a huge success with developers who are able to work with tools familiar to them (such as Visual Studio), designers keep asking us to improve their experience in designing applications using Silverlight and so we are also providing a preview of the new Expression Blend 3 and some of its main features are:

Expression Blend 3 will include a new set of features called SketchFlow designed to make it easier for you to experiment with dynamic user experiences and create compelling prototypes. It enables the navigation and composition of an application to be modeled in a very visual manner from a simple prototype that uses a series of sketches, to something much more evolved. A prototype can be made as real and interactive as it needs to be to communicate design intent and SketchFlow can leverage all the existing features of Expression Blend

NOTE: I am not sure SketchFlow will be included in the preview version released today… stay tuned for more info about this…
Native import of Photoshop and Illustrator assets which simplifies the work allowing designers to keep using the tools they prefer and sill be able to create stunning interfaces in Blend… with full support for individual layers which retain their original layer effects, layout, editable text, and vector content
New Behaviors feature which allow to add interactivity to application WITHOUT having to write code
Support for Sample Data which allows to design interfaces when there is no access to live data!This allows generating sample data or import sample data from an XML file and makes it available to controls on the artboard at design-time
Source control integration with Visual Studio - Team Foundation Server which allows to include the work done in Blend into the full source control system plus gives access to all the development lifecycle features of the suite such as work item management, team builds, document sharing, and reporting making designers a first class citizen in the project development process!!
Intellisense support for coding C#, VB.NET and XMAL

Do you need more?

In addition to this:

We are launching a new official Silverlight blog to keep you informed and updated with what is going on in the Silverlight world: http://team.silverlight.net/

The World Wide telescope is available in Silverlight via its web client: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient. If you have never heard of the World Wide Telescope, it is a technology which allows to browse high resolution imagery taken by telescopes worldwide… if you have never seen it… you have to now!!!!

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released and is available here.

Version 2 of of the Web Platform Installer beta has also been released. Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit has also been released on MSDN. Itenables developers to integrate and enrich their Web-based applications with Windows Live Messenger. With the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit, you will get instant access to:

Real-time presence and communications
Contact relationships
Rich profile data

SuperPreview is a stand-alone visual debugging tool that makes it faster and easier to migrate your sites from IE6 to IE7 or IE8. With SuperPreview, you can ensure that your Web sites work correctly in IE8 while also maintaining compatibility with earlier versions of IE.

SuperPreview shows your web pages rendered in IE6 and either IE7 or IE8, depending on which version you have installed on your machine. You can view the pages side by side or as an onion-skin overlay and use rulers, guides and zoom/pan tools to precisely identify differences in layout. You can even compare your page comp to how the targeted browsers render the page.

What next?

I really think my next few days will be REALLY busy trying out lots of this!!!! And if you are an Academic in the UK and want to learn more… there is still some time to sign up for out Silverlight Insight sessions where I will cover some of the new features too!!! Check my previous blog post for more info!!!

Fireworks to XAML exporter

2009-03-12T17:07:48Z

I used to use a lot Adobe Fireworks for web design work and actually always preferred it to Photoshop to create application mockups and page layouts (I am a big fan of vector graphics and grew up using Corel Draw A LOT).

Now for the joy of all Fireworks fans, Infragistics released a plug in that allows to “convert artwork created in the Fireworks software to the new XAML format used to declaratively define user interfaces in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)” (and I will add Silverlight although I guess that would need to be tested as Silverlight is a subset of WPF so some features may not work with it).

You can also find additional info on Grant Hinkson’s post on the Adobe Devnet.

Not sure if this will work on Macs though, has anybody tried it?

Windows Marketplace for Mobile: great news especially for students

2009-03-12T00:27:52Z

We just announced more details on the plans for the upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

The Marketplace will be a mean to distribute apps developed for the Windows Mobile 6.5 platform which will allow developers to sell their apps at a price they choose (or distribute them for free should they prefer). Much like Community Games for Xbox Live or… well… the App Store for the iPhone :)

While you can find more details on the official press release, there are a couple of things I would like to highlight:

A portal for developers who want to start developing for the Windows Mobile Platform, is already available at http://developer.windowsmobile.com. While Windows Mobile 6.5 is not yet available, the tools and techniques already available there are the same that will apply for the upcoming version so now it is a great time to get up to speed
While developers will need to pay a fee to submit apps to the Marketplace… students will have the fee waived via the Dreamspark program. If you don’t know what Dreamspark is… well, basically is a site where students can go, register themselves (and validate their status a students) and then get access to a whole bunch of Microsoft technologies which inlcude:

Windows Server 2003 and 2008
Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Edition
Robotics Developer Studio 2008 Academic Edition
SQL Server 2008 Developer
Expression Studio
An IT Academy Student pass

Details on Silverlight 3 start emerging…

2009-03-10T16:25:35Z

With the MIX 09 conference approaching soon, some details on Silverlight 3.0 start emerging after Scott Guthrie’s mention of what’s coming in the post he published back in November 2008:

“Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements - we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer. ;-)”

First of all a number of MIX sessions will cover several aspects of it:

User Experience Design Patterns for Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3

Come hear how creating great user experiences for business applications can result in both improved productivity and significant support cost savings. Learn how to use proven user experience patterns in cost effective ways with Silverlight 3, including rich data display, data input and advanced data validation, and application navigation.
What's New in Microsoft Silverlight 3

Take a tour of the new features in Silverlight 3 including a dive into some of the new experience oriented features like pixel shaders, perspective 3D, animation enhancements, bitmap APIs and improvements to the media stack. Also hear about new Silverlight base framework additions including updates to the style model, data binding improvements, improved resource handling and improvements to the web services stack.
Deep Dive into Microsoft Silverlight Graphics

Come hear about the Silverlight 3 rendering pipeline, and learn how to enhance your application experience with the latest additions to the Silverlight graphics APIs.
Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3

This will be a great Silverlight session, but we won't be able to release any details until after MIX09 Keynotes. Check this abstract after MIX09 Keynotes for a complete session description.
Consuming Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 3

Come hear how to work with external REST, SOAP, and Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services from Silverlight. Learn how to securely and efficiently communicate with services using Binary XML, debug services with improved Faults support, and implement server-to-client "push" using the new Add Service Reference for Duplex functionality

For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to be in Vegas, all the sessions will be made available online, watch this space and the official MIX 09 website for details.

In anticipation of the event though, you can already get some insights and sneek peeks at SL3. Channel 9 published a video podcast with Brad Adams on building business apps with Silverlight 3

Mike Snow just anticipated that he’s working on a book titled “Silverlight Game Programming” which is based on Silverlight 3, and will walk you through how to create a multi-player online RPG in Silverlight. Included is a Map Editor written in Silverlight that allows you to create maps for your game. I definitely cannot wait for it!!!

I will be following all the announcements and try to digest all the new info in time for our Silverlight Insight event for UK Academics where I hope I will manage to show some new and shiny stuff!