Today is the second day of Mix07. There's a lot more people, and much more buzz than yesterday.
Twitter is being used to send updates out to folks, and enable impromptu sessions and meeting among folks.
As a result of twitter I got a chance to meet with Scott Hanselman and talk with him some about CGM devices and the challenges of handling different data formats from these data collection devices. And Scott did a great job summarizing the announcements from day one of Mix.
Mix07 seems to be much more around rich media and media delivery to you via desktop apps, web browsers, or mobile devices. For those of us who are building enterprise applications, the rich media stuff is not immediately of interest. But we're also seeing a lot more tools around developing UIs for Silverlight. And once you're on that platform - the world is yours (or so Microsoft would have you believe).
At lunch I was chatting with the Microsoft Program Manager responsible for the MSDN user interface. She showed me how they've used Starlight to add videos to the front page, and how they've improved the search experience. Nice job, and it sounds as if more is coming soon to MSDN.
My biggest complaint so far? Too many interesting sessions on at the same time: I guess that's a good complaint. Having the videos on the Mix07 site will help, but it's not really the same. And as of right now (late on Tuesday) very few of the videos are actually there.
Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a session on Amazon Web Services and much more on Silverlight.
This was a packed session that deserved to be in a much bigger room. Polita Paulus and Mahesh Prakriya covered the new dynamic data controls available in ASP.NET.
Essentially these controls make it much easier to add master-detail editing to a web site based on a database. Polita did a great presentation that showed using both C# and IronPython to extend the behavior of these dynamic controls.
Drop one of the controls on the page, and you get basic editing for almost no work. You can add a little code and the control will use UI widgets that you provide and can extend. And if you add a row to the database, it displays automatically when your rebuild and redeploy.
The demo included displaying pictures that are retrieved from the database, with no converter code required.
I've not done any ASP.NET programming in several years, but this stuff was impressive for the amount of UI you can create for almost no written code.
I just left the tail-end of the Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie keynote session at Mix07.
The session was jam-packed with folks standing at the back of the room (probably around 1,000 in attendance).
Ray was repurposing SaaS from Software as a Service to Software and a Service. It really sounds like they're embracing the approach that was first widely deployed with the iPod. Software running in the network cloud, and on the desktop (or in a browser), and on a mobile device. As Ozzie said, software 'embracing the value of the client'.
Most of the session was devoted to Silverlight and some new announcements around Silverlight design and development tools. Lots of cool demos from MLB.com, CBS, Netflix and others.
Lots of examples of rich content (especially live and streaming video) embedded in the web page. And they showed these running in IE7 and Firefox on Windows Vista and Firefox and Safari running on Mac. There also a nice demo showing a debugger running on Windows that was debugging a client session running on a Mac - that was impressive!
I also noticed an emphasis on the size of the download and the user experience in installing a Silverlight application. With broadband, it may seem that size no longer matters but remember there are still a large number of user environments (for example retail stores) that don't have a huge bandwidth connections to the client.
Scott Guthrie also pointed out several times how Silverlight is much faster for development and execution that JavaScript. He showed a simple chess program with a .NET chess player running against a JavaScript player. Silverlight 1.5 million move node calculation \versus JavaScript 500 node calculations for the same game. .NET wins. A little cheap but effective.
I'm in the big ballroom at the Venetian Hotel waiting for the start of the general session for Mix07. Microsoft has setup quite show with four huge screens (I'm guessing about 15 feet by 20 feet each) plus a central area where currently a three piece band is playing some interesting music.
There's quite a buzz in the crowd and the room is filling up (enough room for about 1,000 people I'm guessing).
I plan to blog some about the sessions that I attend and let you know what I think about each of them. So until Wednesday, most of the posts will be related to Microsoft and MS technology. More later.
Diabetes: technology, devices, software, and other stuff.
About Me
Name: Bernard Farrell
Location: Massachusetts, United States
I was born in Ireland and now live in the US.
I have had Type 1 diabetes for over 35 years. I struggle with my blood sugar, the same as most people with diabetes.
I wear a Cozmo 1800 insulin pump and a Dexcom SEVEN CGM to track my blood glucose levels. I also take Symlin to help control my post-meal blood sugars.
I'm blessed by God, and every day brings the possibility of a cure.
