MIX on Monday

I can say that when I decided to go to Mix this year, my main goal was to meet some of the folks involved with WPF and to learn more about what was called WPF/E. I suspected something was up however when Microsoft announced Silverlight a few weeks ago, knowing they were planning something much larger. So in the keynote they dropped the bomb that Silverlight will include the entire .NET runtime. It was actually ironic because I was talking to someone from Adobe (formally with Macromedia) before the keynote and I asked him what he thought about Silverlight as it related to Flash and he just commented that it didn't include any type of engine. I bet he as well as the rest of Adobe dropped their own bomb when they heard that news.

So what are the advantages of .NET in the browser? Listening to the keynote, the big things I can see are faster execution, better controls, better DOM and the fact that they are including LINQ! Yes, LINQ in the browser. Scott Guthrie even did a quick demo on a chess game he wrote that pits the .NET engine against the Javascript engine in Silverlight. It showed how many nodes per second were processed by each and it became obvious how much faster .NET will be that JS. Hey Brett, just think, drawing the freehand paths may actually be acceptable now!!!

Another cool announcement was the Silverlight Streaming Alpha, which is a web site you can upload videos to (up to 4GB total) and get a direct URL back for viewing on any web site, which can be easily used in Silverlight applications. Sounds like Microsoft's YouTube to me, but either way combining this with the great media abilities of Silverlight, web sites should be better than ever. Check out http://silverlight.live.com.

With keynotes taking up most of the morning, the afternoon was left to breakout sessions. The first one I attended was Silverlight and Javascript, but it was way too crowded and I got to sit between two guys bigger than myself. The three of us started producing way too much heat so I decided to call it early. I did get to see the presenter use the Javascript object model to access to access WPF entities built with Blend.

The next session I attended was something called Accessing Data Services in the Cloud. I didn't really understand what I was walking into but it was recommended to me. Ended up being a really cool breakout, as Microsoft announced something called "Astoria". I will not do any justice to this technology, so I'll just keep it brief Astoria exposes data as a service, allowing access via HTTP as the exchange. The coolest thing I saw it used for was with JSON, which allows the data to simply be exposed as objects inside of Javascript. There's also an online service available, but keep in mind "Astoria" is a new technology in just preview form. I have no idea of what type of product it will end up as. You can check out more information at http://astoria.mslivelabs.com.

I tried to go to more sessions, but both of the ones I went to were cramped and hot, and I just didn't feel like sitting through another 1 ½ of it. I'm heading to the Mashup tonight though, so the evening is still to come.

Chris