Wednesday, September 12, 2007MIX:UK 07 Keynote

Yesterday marked the first of two days of MIX:UK 07. MIX is an interesting conference because it puts 500 developers and designers under the same roof. You can see the effect of a dual audience right from the opening video of the keynote which is clearly aimed at including designers. The 90 minute keynote was essentially a showcase of existing or near-release examples of SilverLight, AJAX and WPF applications. Here’s what was shown:-

  • Paul Dawson (Conchango) showed MixReader, a SilverLight app for browsing MIX:UK content. MixReader is included on the 1GB USB stick given out with everyone’s lanyard.
  • George Moore (General Manager of Windows Live Platform, Microsoft) showed AdventureWorks (http://www.codeplex.com/WLQuickApps), a SilverLight app that utilises Windows Live Services. AdventureWorks will be released on 12th September 2007.
  • Jonathon (Sentient) showed TrackMe (http://www.trackme.com), a Silverlight and Virtual Earth (?) app for tracking where your friends are. It sends you an text message when your friends are nearby (physically). TrackMe, shown for the first time at MIX:UK, isn’t available yet.
  • Paul Curtis (Architect at easyJet Holidays) showed their holidays website (http://holidays.easyjet.com), an AJAX app that uses Windows Live Services and Virtual Earth.
  • Lee Atkinson (Technical Architect at TwoFour) and Ben Stirling (Head of Design at TwoFour) showed the TwoFour SilverLight Media Player, a SilverLight app for showing video from the government.
  • Dan Scarfe (CEO, DotNet Solutions) and Ravi Nar (Project Manager, DotNet Solutions) showed Online Scrum Wall, a SilverLight application for managing a Scrum project. This was particularly interesting because it showed real time update of other clients (using the same technology as ActiveSync, I think) that were showing the same data.
  • Mike Hawes (Technical Architect, Sage) showed Online Taxation Processing, a WPF / XPS / SilverLight application to allow entry of tax data. This application was interesting because it converted PDF files to XPS and then rendered them using WPF and worked with the forms programmatically.
Another interesting moment in the keynote was Jon Harris’s (Developer Evangelist, Microsoft) demo of Microsoft Expression Encoder (released at the beginning on September 2007). Microsoft Expression Encoder:-

  • Can read 100+ file formats
  • Can add markers to video
  • Supports a very cool "A/B Compare" mode that allows you to modify a media file (to reduce the frame rate for example) and see just a section of the file shown side by side with the original running in real time so that you can compare the before and after
  • Can be driven by the command line (for batch automation of modifying files)
  • Can publish media files direct to SilverLight servers
All in all quite an interesting keynote.

Technorati tags: MIX, MIX:UK, Silverlight, WPF, AJAX, Windows Live Platform, Virtual Earth