PeteL's Blog : conferences

November is conference month…

PeteL — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:50:49 GMT

Every November comes around and I’m always reminded how many conference seem to take place about now, it’s kind of crazy – in a good way. I’m on to week three of travel, and haven’t seen my own bed in more nights than I care to count – but ah well!

Where I’ve Been

Last week was TechEd Europe in Berlin. A great conference with lots of good materials! Coincidentally it took place during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and the celebrations were pretty spectacular!

While I was there, I recorded a couple of TechTalks with my good pal Matt, they’re worth checking out!

Windows Internet Explorer Web Slices and Accelerator Analytics
Do you have an Accelerator or Web Slice on your website? This talk will cover how you can put analytics on those pages so that you truly understand how people are using them, and how you can best monetize them.

A Quick Tour Through Windows Internet Explorer 8's Security Features
Do you know all of the security features Internet Explorer 8 offers to consumers, developers, and enterprises? We'll take a whirlwind tour of all of them and how you might use them to make sure you are safe and your privacy is protected on the internet.

There should be one more coming in the next couple of days. I was feeling a bit goofy with the security one, so be sure to check it out :)

Where Am I Now?

This week is Web 2.0 Expo in NYC, so come say hi! If you’re in the city I think you can get a free expo pass and check out a bunch of the sessions without having to shell out a dime! Not a bad deal! We’ll be at the IE booth Wednesday and Thursday. My HTML5 session is on Thursday from 1:20 to 2:10pm.

While I’m here, I’m also applying for a visa to visit Saudi Arabia!

Where Am I Off To Next?

I guess technically it’s home next, but my next work trip is to Saudi Arabia to go to the Gulf Developers Conference in Riyadh! It’s going to be a super action packed couple of days with lots of great info. I’ve seen an early list of the agenda and wow! Think PDC but in Riyadh instead of LA. I’m not so upset about missing PDC now :)

PS: Still working on the VPC issue. I know it’s a problem and we’re still trying to find a good solution for this!

TechEd09 - Top 10 Mistakes Made By Web Developers

PeteL — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:59:00 GMT

I consider myself a developer more than a designer. In fact, I’m pretty bad at web design. I know what looks nice, and I know what doesn’t work well, but I’m not so good at creating kick butt designs. So, at TechEd last year, I presented “Top 10 Mistakes Made By Web Developers” and it went over extremely well, and I was asked to do it again this year. I did it twice at TechEd EMEA in Barcelona, and was asked to do it twice this year as we filled the room the first time!

Since it was an Interactive session, it’s not recorded, nor are the slides put online but I offered to share some of the sites I used both as good sites and bad sites and also share the slides!

I’ll be posting the demo code from WUX310 later this week!

Thanks!

Top 10 Web Mistakes [From TechEd EMEA]

PeteL — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:20:00 GMT

I just finished presenting my last session of TechEd EMEA for 2008 and I'm sad to be leaving! But, hopefully I'll get another chance next year.

My last session was a repeat of "Top 10 Web Mistakes" and I said I'd post some of the sites that I showed during the session, so here they are.

Sites That Suck
http://www.teacherxpress.com/
How am I supposed to find content on this site?

http://www.continental.com
Some validation errors are okay, others, maybe not so much.

http://www.samanzerin.com/
I don't even know where to start, figuratively or literally.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/seattle/flowmaps/bridges.htm
http://wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/
Nice to see consistency on here. :)

http://www.toyjoy.com/
Only pop ups? Really?

http://twitter.com/home
Think about your work flow.

http://www.miniusa.com/#
Try turning JavaScript off and count the clicks to a 404.

http://www.ccps.k12.fl.us/schools/LBHS/
A little too much flash for me.

http://www.barcelona.com/
Hmm, ad too much?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html
Let's find a creative way of putting ads on a page.

http://users.hunterlink.net.au/~mbbjsj/index.htm
http://www.havenworks.com/
http://www.5safepoints.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20060613061524/http:/moire.ch/
If only there were a group like Doctors Without Boarders, Designers Without Boarders.

Sites That Rock
http://www.BrightCreative.com
GREAT use of isolating hacks!

Thanks for a great time in Barcelona!

ReMIX Sessions from Amsterdam

PeteL — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:29:00 GMT

Sorry for being so quiet lately, things have been a little nutty, but in a good way. We've been pretty heads down working on all kinds of fun stuff, the next version of IE, the next version of Expression Web and getting ready to launch Visual Studio 2008. I'm really excited to see that one ship. I worked on it for almost a year before I transitioned to this role, and I know almost all the folks on the team, and am amazed at what they've pulled off!

I just got an email from Mariet, who was the primary coordinator of the ReMIX sessions in Europe this spring. All of the sessions in Amsterdam were video taped, and are now available online! So if you didn't make it to MIX or ReMIX, you can see some of the sessions, myself included on the ReMIX website.

PS: We should have the new VPC images up in the next day or two. I'll be sure to post when they are up!

ReMIX: Search Engine Optimization For Rich Internet Applications

PeteL — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:06:00 GMT

I think that this was my favorite session I did while doing all my ReMIX presentations. It was the one I found most interesting, and most relevant to the work that I do, and see many web developers and designers doing every day.

I'm not sure if there is video for this session, but if it shows up, I'll be sure to link to it. In the mean time, I've included the slides for you to check out, and I'll try to get a blog post out about in the next week or two summarizing the info in the deck.

ReMIX: Using Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas

PeteL — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:57:00 GMT

I presented this session both in Amsterdam and in Zürich, though I managed to lose my notes in Zürich and had do to a number of the demo's by the seat of my pants which was a bit of a challenge.

In any event, it was based on a session by Omar Khan of the VWD team that he presented at MIX07, called "Using Visual Studio Codename Orcas to Design And Devloper Rich AJAX Enable Web Sites"

ReMIX: Implementing Rich UI For Web Applications

PeteL — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:51:00 GMT

In Amsterdam at ReMIX, I presented "Implementing Rich UI for Web Applications" where I showed how to deliver richly interactive web experiences with animation, video and more using Silverlight and Expression.

It was based on a session from MIX07 by Joe Stegman titled "Building Rich Web Experiences using Silverlight and JavaScript for Developers"

Web Blunders: The Top 5 Biggest Mistakes On The Web

PeteL — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 23:45:00 GMT

At TechEd this year, I presented a session where I presented my top five pet peeves on the web, the biggest and easiest problems to avoid on the web. With how easy it is to share content on the web, I felt that these top five things were the best and easiest to get rid of.

In order, I felt they were:

5. Unprofessional Site Design
4. Lousy Content
3. Poorly coded HTML/CSS/JavaScript
2. Inappropriate use of Rich Content
1. Not Being POSH

I've attached my slides below, so check them out, and let me know what your pet peeves are!

TechEd & ReMIX

PeteL — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 19:25:50 GMT

What a great couple of weeks, and it's not over yet! In the last two weeks, I've been to Orlando, Budapest, and Amsterdam, and I'm headed off to Zurich on Sunday. I've got some down time today and tomorrow before two more full days in Zurich. I've learned a lot, seen some fantastic things, and met some really great people.

TechEd 2007 - Orlando

I started TechEd off in Orlando a little early as some of my friends were going to be down there for a few parties and other events that were going on so I figured I'd join them. It was a great way to start the trip and great to see my friends, and meet some new folks. Kind of crazy, and a lot of fun.

TechEd itself was pretty great. We got to meet lots of cool folks, and the presentations that the IE team and I did were all well received. I haven't seen the sessions go online yet, but as soon as they do, I'll make another posting to them. I did do one session, and I'll post it in another blog entry.

As usual, I shot a whole wack of photos that you can find on my flickr account.

ReMIX - Budapest

On the last day of TechEd, I got on a plane headed for Budapest to do my first ReMIX event. It started Monday at the Museum of Fine Art, one of the coolest venues I've ever seen. We basically had two big halls filled with chairs, a podium, speakers, projection screens and peices of art that were out of this world. I was presenting with two Greek urns (I think that's what they were) on either side of me. Kudo's to Microsoft for getting such a great venue.

The presentations went well in Budapest, though it was much different than any other audience I've ever spoken to before. Because of the language difference (English for me, and Hungarian+English) for everyone else, we had to speak very slowly, and be sure to ennunciate everything. I kind of felt like I was much more mellow than I usually am when I'm on stage. People seemed interested though, and had some great questions after my session, so I'm guessing everything went well.

Again, they said they would be posting our presentations, and I'll link to them as soon as they're up. If I don't see them in the next few days, I'll just upload them to my own server so everyone can get them.

Photos from Budapest are also uploaded to Flickr

ReMIX - Amsterdam

They mixed (pardon the pun) ReMIX Amsterdam with DevDays, and we had a great showing. I did a couple of fun sessions, and there were lots of people there. I was a little worried about my first session, but it seemed to go pretty well, and there were lots of good questions, so I was happy.

I haven't shot as many photos here, but I've shot quite a few, I'm planning on taking my film camera out tomorrow to see what I can get. It should be pretty interesting, there is lots of stuff around here to photograph.

I think I got my most interesting question that I've received since this tour started in Amsterdam though. The question was, "with Silverlight now out, does that mean HTML is dead at Microsoft?" The resounding answer is no. It's just another way of sharing stuff with your users, but I want to write a better post on it than that, so keep an eye out for it.

I'm off to Zurich on Sunday, then back to Seattle on Thursday, so I'll try to get back blogging as the week goes on! And if you're at any of the sessions, come on up and say Hi!

reMIX 07 and serEstandar.es

PeteL — Mon, 14 May 2007 21:53:00 GMT

With MIX07 just behind us, there are some fun events coming up in Europe, Asia and else where in the world. REMIX 07 is an opportunity to for people who didn't or couldn't make it to Vegas to see some of the great sessions and events that took place at MIX.

But what I like about reMIX is that I get to do a couple of the sessions, and maybe even a keynote. The sessions are still being locked down, but there is a live site with a bunch of the information at http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/visitremix/index_emea.html

I'm currently planning on heading to:

I'm also heading to Seville at the end of June for serEstandar.es. The site is in Spanish, which I can't really read, but I can tell you the names of the other presenters are pretty prestigeous! It'll be a bit intimidating to be with all of those great speakers, but a lot of fun none the less. I do get to spend pretty much the entire month of June with Molly, so that should be a blast, I'm quite looking forward to that.

Edit: fixed URL for reMIX site

MIX07 Recap (It's Over)

PeteL — Sat, 05 May 2007 00:24:51 GMT

Wow, just wow, that's all I really need to say. MIX07 was insane, an absolute great time, and some fantastic new stuff coming out from Microsoft for the web. So what were the highlights, for me it came down to three things, first the announcements around Silverlight, second was all the great sharing we got to do about IE, and third, was meeting some fantastic people.

I didn't really get a chance to blog while I was at MIX this year, which I wish I had, but we were all so busy, attending sessions, hanging out, hearing what you had to say, eating drinking and being merry.

IE

As Chris mentioned on the IE Blog, we didn't have anything to announce this year at MIX, we were there to listen, and provide some information. Chris's IE session was standing room only, and it went over well. He talked about some of the great features of IE7, but then moved into the things that we've learned about shipping IE, and what we need to deal with with future versions of IE.

The point Chris brought up as one of the hardest things to balance is application compatibility. Almost every time we change IE, the rendering engine or the DOM we cause an application to break. So how do we balance existing applications vs handling standards better? Chris brought up the idea that there may need to be some kind of new switch that makes IE behave in a specific way. If it's not there, you get one thing, if it is, you get something else.

Silverlight

Silverlight is awesome, to put it mildly. Imagine building super sweet, rich web applications using technology you already knew, like maybe C#. That's the whole idea behind Silverlight. It's a cross-browser(!), cross-platform(!) plug in for delivering the next generation of media experience and rich interactive applications. The beta that is out today doesn't have support for the C# yet, but there is an alpha out that does. The demo's that they showed just awed me.

The best place to check out is http://www.Silverlight.net. There are plenty of demos, samples and other stuff there that just kicks butt. The fact that you can get high def video streaming easily, is amazing. One of the keynote partners was Netflix, who showed their streaming video service in Silverlight. The player they use today is great, it works, but why install that when the only application that is going to use it is their player? I'd love the idea of multi-use applications, not something that is only used for one purpose. And because it's a dot net application, they were able to add a whole bunch of super cool features, like video sharing, so you can synchronize watching movies with your friends anywhere in the world.

Meeting Great Folks

One of the things I love most about conferences is getting the opportunity to meet developers and designers. The guys from Microsoft Canada planned a small party at Tao on Monday night, and a whole bunch of us (21 or so) ended up at Postrio for dinner. It was a fun dinner, and a good way to hear about the stuff they were working on. My friend Adam passed his camera around the table and there are a bunch of his photos are on Flickr

Interesting Links from MIX07

If you didn't make it to MIX, there are other ways you can participate! You can watch the sessions online, or if you're outside North America, there are going to be several ReMix events around the world coming up. I'll be at a few of them in June, so keep an eye here for more info!

Pre Define Your Event Tags

PeteL — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:02:31 GMT

I'm on the airplane on my way back from the SV Web Builders Browser War event, and it was pretty cool. It was great to meet Mike Shaver from Mozilla (and fellow Canadian), Hakom Lie from Opera and Douglas Crockford (aka Internet Genius) of Yahoo! fame.

As I was shooting photos (which will be on Flickr shortly after we get on the ground and I can get a net connection), and shooting video, it occured to me, how am I going to tag this stuff? The event organizers didn't define and promote any tags for the event!

One of the really successful things that the Web Directions North guys did was predefine the tags and tell people about them. They were in the attendee book, and they were mentioned several times during the conference. You can find all the photos from Web Directions North just by looking at a few of the tags.

So, if you're putting on any kind of event, user group meeting, conference, geek meet up, anything, I'd love it if you told me how to tag it so my photos are associated with the event, and I can easily find everyone elses.

And on that note, if you're on flickr, be sure to turn on public tagging! It's a great feature, and lets the community tag and add all sorts of info to your photos. I think every one of my WDN photos are tagged with the people in them now because of that!

IE, Firefox and Opera On Stage Together

PeteL — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 02:52:00 GMT

I often forget to blog about some of the cool events I attend until it's a little too late, but hey, better than blogging about it after the fact, when people can't even try to show up right?

Tomorrow, Chris Wilson and I are headed down to San Jose for an event put on by the Silicon Valley Web Builders for a session that they're calling Browser Wars: Episode II Attack of the DOMs. Beside the name being something that bugs me a bit, this is going to be a fantastic event!

This is one of the few times that Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera have been on stage together to talk about where the web goes next, and what their visions are for the future. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by what Chris has to say. Chris and I sat down on Monday to figure out what we were going to say, and what we wanted to get across for this event. We only have a 10 minute presentation. After each browser vendor has done their presentation, we move into a discussion.

I'm going to take my camera, and a video camera, and try to get a few video clips that we can put online, so keep an eye on my blog early next week for a summary and photos!

PS: we're still working on judging the entries for the IE add-on contest, and should have the results up Monday or Tuesday! Good luck to all who entered!

Edit: Fixed title

Post Web Direction North and Web Compatibility

PeteL — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:40:43 GMT

I got back from Web Directions North last Sunday, and I got hit HARD with a cold or something. I made it into work on Monday to meet with the great Molly Holzschlag to figure out what our priorities are going to be for content development, and where we're looking for our long term relationship to go. How do we make the most of Molly's time and resources?

Molly and I came up with some really good things I think. We have 12 topics we're going to focus on over the next year or so, both from an inside out perspective (creating help documents, samples, tutorials, videos, etc) and outside in (taking your feedback and making sure the product team for IE, and other teams hear it). As you can imagine, there is lots of feedback, so figuring out what the common themes are is a big task. Something I would like for us to spend more time on.

I ended up leaving Molly early on Monday, as I was getting sick. Sicker than I've been in ages! (Thanks Molly for putting up with a sick Pete) I went home, and went to bed. I think between Monday afternoon and Friday afternoon, I left my condo twice, once to go to the doctors, and once to take the garbage out. Thank goodness for TiVo, NetFlix and books. (I wish the library worked the same way NetFlix did, that'd be cool, I'd pay for that.)

I did spend some time this weekend updating my personal fine art photography site. I've got a show coming up in March, and well, I knew my site didn't render in IE6, and it looked pretty bad in FireFox. The big problem was when I originally wrote it, it didn't have the DOCTYPE switch in it, and well, yah, thats bad. So last night, I took the 20 minutes needed to put the DOCTYPE switch in, and fix the layout. But yay, now http://www.bbpphoto.com renders correctly in IE6, IE7, FireFox, Safari and Opera!

Up At Web Directions North

PeteL — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:30:00 GMT

This has been a pretty great few days up here in Vancouver at Web Directions North. It's been fantastic to connect with so many of you, to get to meet some great people, and hear some good, honest feedback.

I think that biggest comment that I've walked away with so far (and we've still got a day to go), is that people are very glad we're back as a viable browser vendor, and that they appreciate seeing us at events like Web Directions and other conferences where they can actually ask questions and interact with us on a 1:1 level.

Molly Holzschlag did the keynote yesterday talking about crimes against standards that was really interesting and funny. Towards the end, she asked people to stand up and confess to their crimes. Although I didn't do mine publically during the keynote, I figure I might as well do it now. I hosted my frames based site on GeoCities. Yes, GeoCities. I feel so dirty. And I think it might still be there, but do you think I know the user name or password?

I'm looking forward to all the sessions today, there are a few things though that have really peaked my interest. For example George Oates and Paul Hammond from Flickr and Yahoo! are going to be talking about "Web Apps: From Developer to Designer", which is always something that I've found fascinating. Then later in the day, Dave Shea and Veerle Pieters are doing a session on the design process.

I've posted my photos from the conference on Flickr, and you can find a few other feeds of photos here and here (both from Flickr).

Off to start the webcast the IE team is doing today....