MIX07 off to a great start

I've been quiet again for a while, mostly because my team has been heads-down for a few weeks working on a demo for ScottGu's MIX keynote, and today it went off without a hitch. 

Silverlight is an absolutely amazing platform, and I'm not just saying that because it's coming out of MS.  The whole story - from designer tools, to developer tools, to platform - is just fantastic and has a great feel to it.  It's one of those times when you've got the right pieces floating around (.NET, WPF, the Expression Suite) and you tie them together into something that's bigger than the sum of it's parts.  Mac support, FireFox support, cross platform debugging, light auto-install, it's all there. 

My team has been working on the Airline Demo that Scott showed today and it went off beautifully.  I'd like to give some props to Bret Victor, who's fantastic Magic Ink whitepaper was the inspration for the app.  Being backstage for the keynotes at one of these big shows is quite an experience.  You could launch a space shuttle from back there.  I've been to many, many big developer shows but never really realized now much orchastration there is.  Anyway, basically we demo'd an experience where you can easily plan an airline trip with three mouse clicks - instead of the maze of drop downs and radio buttons most airline websites currently present to users.  It got the point across very well.

Anyway, if you got a chance to see it either here in Vegas or online, I hope you liked what you saw.  As a guy who worked on Windows Forms for 8 years, I'm definitely excited to be working with a client-based programming model again (don't get me wrong, ASP.NET is great, stateless is just hard sometimes).  As a guy who's been doing Javascript for the last year, I'm DEFINTELY excited to be back into a compiled language with a full-toolset!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2007
  A whole team was working on that for weeks? But I thought this was sooooo easy and fast to do :-) Sweet demo by the way!

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2007
  Ha - yes I admit it took longer than 10 minutes to write. ;)  Great glad you liked it... Two of my devs pretty much wrote the full application in two or three days -- all of the functionality was present.  It really was pretty amazing how quickly it came together. But, as with all software, just because the app "works" doesn't mean you're anywhere done.  That also doesn't count the "investigation" time of learning Silverlight, getting stable builds, etc. Final tweaks to make it a great demo, getting the final UI design locked in, etc. took quite a bit of extra time.  

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2007
  During his keynote at the MIX07 conference in Las Vegas , Scott Guthrie showed off some of the power

• Anonymous
  May 07, 2007
  Magnificent!  When does Silverlight go gold?