ReMix '07 London Day One

So here I am with a nice new shiny blog to post on, figured it was about time I got round to putting something on it. BM very kindly took me to Mix '07 in London, so blogging on my experiences here would probably seem to be a prudent thing to do....

The keynote kicked off very well, with the main theme obviously being the newly announced SilverLight from Microsoft. Quite a few shiny demos, including one that was along the lines of a project that Mat and myself have been working on in our off time, though I think we've got a slightly different angle on it. More to come on that when we actually get something working (unlike theirs, which works, and works very well!). Was impressed by the project from SAGE, using the XPS printer to create working XAML, an approach I've not seen before and was pleasantly surprised that it worked as well as it did. Also, I was very surprised at the focus on streaming media, something that I'd not considered before, but can now see, given the rise of youtube and other sites why

From there, I stayed on the Developer track and attended the SilverLight talk from ScottGu. While it was a very good talk, it mostly covered ground that I've seen before with the Avalon/WPF release, such as the databinding, the basic shapes and various other bits. A nice part was the announcements of what was coming to SilverLight 1.1, such as the layout managers and other brushes. The layout managers are the main reason I would chose WPF over a standard WinForms application, having seen their power in my Java based coursework, I really missed them in the move to .NET. The second half of the talk was more of the same, though also covering some of the more SilverLight specific things, such as the ability to manipulate the HTML DOM from C# and various other fancy bits. Overall, a very well presented talk, and quite impressive technology behind it

The 3rd talk I abandoned the developer track and went to the Reading technologies talk on the Designer track. The people giving the talk had written a very fancy application to keep people updated on the goings on the event, such as twitter feeds, facebook and the various blogs of the speakers. The app is built on the .NET flow controls, meaning it resizes automatically and various other fancy bits. The app itself was very cool, but with it being on the design track it wasn't technical enough, though the demonstrations of Blend and the designer tools were quite enlightening.

Then back to the developer track for the Developer Panel. The theme for the talk was 'Client and the Cloud'.  A lot of insightful questions relating to the problem, and the decision between them. I can see the cloud gradually building, but while download bandwidth is cheap, upload is still restricted heavily, certainly limiting my wish to use S3 and other services. As a keen amateur sports photographer, I'd love to use something like that to backup my photo libraries, but at 10Mb a photo, it takes quite a long time. Also, nothing was said about synchronization, and the problems of linking many disparate clients to the cloud, again something that needs to be addressed before it becomes widespread. I want the same RSS feeds on my laptop, my desktop and my mobile without having to worry about syncing them all together.

 

And then, it was time for the Guitar Hero tournament. Now, I'm appalling at this game, however Jonny is pretty good. How good, we then found out, as he went on to win the whole thing, after a lot of support and cheering from the BM crowd at the back of the room.

So that was Day 1, more to come later. Now I have Live Writer installed, I can blog offline. See, magical cloud/client problems, they're everywhere when you start looking....