ReMix '07 London Day Two

And then there were two! Well, two days worth anyway. The second day of Mix kicked off pretty quickly, with myself attending the developer track on ASP.NET 3.5, the only part of the framework to be unchanged in the 3.0 release, and really needing a massive overhaul in the face of WPF and the abilities contained therein. Fortunately, MS have carried through, and ASP.NET is gaining the fancy databinding techniques lifted directly from WPF, along with the addition of LINQ to make the actual data query and manipulation much easier. If only I'd had that about a month ago.... (ah, the unanimous refrain of any developer seeing what is now possible after spending hours and hours on something that was just made irrelevant!) Also, VS2008 is now capable of dealing with nested Master Pages, a feature that although supported in the language since 2.0 has yet to make an appearance in the IDE, this is part of a general enhancement to the design/source view switcher which now appears to be a lot faster and therefore a lot more usable. This culminates in the 'killer feature' of the enhancements: Split design/source view, something present in every other web IDE, but has always been missing from VS. Rest easy you little hybrid designer/developer bods, it's now nice and simple.

The addition of LINQ to ASP.NET should finally give a standard method of data access and manipulation, again something that I could of done with about a month ago, the ease of databinding, especially with the new templated dynamic controls positively makes me drool at it, and wondering if I can convince Boss that moving to VS2008 now would be a good thing (probably not, but it's got to be worth a try).

The next talk was IronPython, something that's close to my heart as Python is a language I've been gradually learning for the last couple of years. This was my first chance to see IronPython in a demonstration/non-novice setting, and I was pretty impressed with how much of the language is implemented and linked seamlessly to the .NET framework. This is also something I'd love to start using more, especially with the SilverLight integration. I've got some ideas for personal projects using this technology, but I'm still not sold on it's place in the .NET developers toolkit. Although the language is quite funky, it's still fundamentally the .NET framework, which to most people means C#. Given that C# is the standard, selling people on the use of a smaller, less well known technology is always going to be tricky, and convincing C# developers to switch is always going to be hard given the amount of time and investment they've already made to learn one .NET based language. The integration into SilverLight is rather suspect on similar grounds. As Rik said after the presentation, if there is already a .NET based javascript language, why would you then switch to a different language to use within SilverLight. If JavaScript is already being used to host the SilverLight, surely it makes more sense to carry on in basically the same language.

My argument that it allows for greater code separation is rather flimsy, and is mainly just to provide an opposing point of view, I really agree with him. (And hope he doesn't read this....) Any further thoughts on it, let me know either by email or by a comment on here.

Then onto the Game Show, otherwise known as blagging as much SWAG as we could get away with. The team made up of half BM (Sam and Mat) managed to win, blagging themselves a wireless presenter mouse in the process, but T-Shirts, pens, notepaper and (bizarrely) socks were in much attendance.

From there, onto Sneak Peeks, or a look at some of the tech that's coming down the wire soon, from MS or partners. The most interesting fact of the session was the fact that Sea Dragon is probably going to hit SilverLight at some point. If you've not seen this tech yet, take a look. Then think about it. Then look again. Then realise that it contains the potential to change completely how reading and viewing on a touch screen (it can be used with a mouse, but that natural interface would be multi-touch) will work. As I've been interested in EBooks and EReading (please, someone buy me the new Sony Reader?) for quite some time, seeing something like this has made me quite excited to see what it can actually do in a Real Work (tm) situation. Also, I was distinctly unimpressed by the Halo 3 trailer, it looks just like Halo 2, which looks like Generic FPS Version 3.0. But if they've cracked Co-Op multiplayer, it might be the game that finally gets me to buy a 360, so I'll wait till we get it for the 360 in work and see what I think!

And then, via the freebies section (Expression Suite and Vista Ultimate, cheers guys!), and the free popcorn (4 tubs), it was onto train and home.

Thanks to all involved for a great event, and thanks to BM for taking me!