Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : MIX08

Deep zoom composer

pooyad — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:53:00 GMT

If you liked the Hard Rock demo from MIX, here's how you can easily build something similar yourself with the Deep Zoom Composer. It's based on the same technology that powers PhotoSynth (SeaDragon) and makes creating these deep zoom applications very simple. Check out the deep zoom version of the Silverlight 2.0 reference poster with 3 lines of XAML and the composer powertool.

MIX08 Steve Ballmer keynote - web developers, web developers, web developers

pooyad — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:50:00 GMT

I somehow got a front row seat for the Steve Ballmer keynote; blogging from here right now :)

A funny and interesting keynote session, you have to see it to fully get the title. The audience questions are, as expected, mainly around the proposed Yahoo acquisition but also covered almost every aspect of Microsoft; it's good to see Steve having a great overview of every area we are in (and there are many).

As entertainment before the keynote we got to see Vince Mira, the "15 year old Johnny Cash", what an amazing voice for a 15 year old.

Update: Here is the excerpt from the keynote that spawned the title (Take a look at Jon Udell's post on how to link to excerpts in video streams or create an excerpt with this nifty online tool)

Internationalization with XAML

pooyad — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:28:00 GMT

I attended a session on internationalization and leared some very useful things about what's available in XAML. The most useful aspect for the typical applications I see was FlowDirection property which lets you easily switch from Left to Right to RtoL. This means that you can do English and Arabic websites and applications where the look is completely defined in XAML and can be changed to go from one direction to another with a simple property switch. Watch the session for more details and how double byte is now supported.

I know that most of the developers in our region work in both English and Arabic, remember there are lots of resources for internationalization best paractices already:

Day 1 at MIX

pooyad — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

After a long long journey from Dubai, I finally arrived in Las Vegas for the first day of MIX08. A very exciting day for me to see Microsoft make some big announcements around the future of our technologies on the web. Check out the official MIX blog recap of the keynote announcements, for me the Beta of Silverlight 2.0 is the biggest thing. I've been playing around with it for a little while and it's amazing, take a look at ScottGu's 8 part post on Silverlight 2.0, it'll make the power very clear, Silvelight 2.0 = .NET in the browser.

There were some very impressive demos shown in the keynote, the AOL mail client shows how far web applications have come. For another fun one, check out the Hard Rock Memorabilia demo, if you like your iPhone zooming (by the way is it just me or does every attendee at MIX have an iPhone or what?) you'll like this demo.

For anyone who couldn't make it to MIX, you can catch the recording of the sessions here: http://sessions.visitmix.com/