I've finally returned home from a crazy month of travel, some for work, some for me. Some good, some.. less than good. Somewhere in the middle of it all I ended up at the Microsoft Mix06 conference in Las Vegas. I personally think that the conference was a huge success. it was very different that previois MS events I have attended such as PDC and TechEd. There were many people there who had never really seen Visual Studio, or any of the .Net related technologies that some of us know and love. This was interesting because these were truly smart people, that are doing amazing things with other tools such as Flash, PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc. I found it very insightful to hear what they had to say, both good and bad about what they saw from Microsoft. I think a few are even rethinking their current tool focus.
Before the conference even officially started I had my first chance to see Origami, the Microsoft codename for the new Ultra Mobile PC's. These are slick little devices with touch screens running the Windows XP Tablet PC operating system.
The conference officially started with the Bill Gates keynote. A little less spectacular that I had hoped for, but it's not everyday you get to see him speak in person so I enjoyed it. The real highlights were hearing about the insane stats from the guys at myspace.com and their use of ASP.Net 2.0. There were some amazing WPF demos showing off work by the BBC and Rezn8. Way cool!
With the major focus on being the web, there was a lot of attention given to Atlas. It has certainly come along way since the first bits were given out at PDC. The latest March CTP was released along with a Go-Love license to starting using it on production sites. Brad Abrams/Rick Spencer and Nikhil Kothari had excellent sessions.
One of the nifty things along the way was the concept of LiveClipboard, recently discussed by Ray Ozzie. There seems to be a lot of moment, and an active community building around microformats. I hope to have a demo of my own of shortly, but until then, check this out: LiveClipboard Demo
A had a lof of questions answer by the Indigo team. Thanks Ami, Clemens, and Steve for all the time and information. Access to amazing people like these is what truly makes these events worthwhile!
There were more cool Avalon (WPF) demos than I could count. All I can say is our expectations of what an application looks like is going to be forever changed.
It was great to see those folks that I only seem to get to talk with at conference. Lora, Loren, Jeff, Reg, Robert, Paul, ChrisG, Trisha, Amy, Caleb, (Sorry if I missed anybody) and also it was a pleasure to meet all you new people as well!
It was 72 hours well spent!
Posted in Rant |