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Design and Develop @ MIX:UK 2007

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by Dominic Green

MIX:UK

is an annual tech event held by Microsoft, focused on development and design for the internet. Earlier this year MIX was held in Vegas and showcased a wide range of new Microsoft technologies especially Silverlight, which gives designers and developers the chance to deliver much richer web sites to their users. When I heard that MIX was coming to the UK I had to go, and was lucky enough to get a ticket.

The event was kicked off with a brilliant keynote, giving us an insight into what was to come over the next couple of days. During the keynote there were a number of demo’s given, displaying what can be done with Silverlight, the Expression Suite, Windows Live, Visual Studio 2008 and many more.

Stunning applications can be quickly build and deployed using the brilliant integration between the Expression Studio and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, both of which are available to download via MSDN. Using Design to build up all the individual sections of an app and then exporting this into Blend allows designers to easily animate their design. The animation and customization isn’t just reserved to shapes but can also be done with videos as was displayed by altering the edges of the video and then animating it so it slowly appeared on screen after a couple of seconds. This was then built upon to create a great video player, which could then be saved as a template for future use with other videos.

This idea of building a rich media player was then build on in Scott Guthrie’s talk on “Building Silverlight Applications using .NET” this was a brilliant two hour presentation which showed how easy it was to create well presented app using XAML. It started off with how to create basic shapes and lines using different fills and boarders, also allowing the designer to fill these shapes with linear and radial gradients. What really struck me was how easy it was to create an app that looked good in just a short space of time; this will be especially true by the time VS2008 ships, as it will then hold a full toolbox for designers and developers to use along with Silverlight.

As a developer it was nice to see that now designers and developers will be working much more together as a team than two separate teams. With XAML being a common point between the two teams it will make it much easier to develop against the designs that are given. This ultimately means that there will be much richer applications being released and also adding a better experience to the end user.

This was most defiantly show in the first presentation of the day given by Scott Guthrie entitled “Building Silverlight Applications in .NET”. During this presentation Scott showed just how easy it was to create a great looking Silverlight app with XAML and all the goodness of a C# code behind file. With XAML it was really easy to get an application to look nice, with shading effects and cool boarders. I was especially impressed with the ability of the Silverlight applications ability to access the user’s local hard-drive, allowing the user to select say a video or document that they would like to see via the Silverlight application.

Windows Live services is something that I see cropping up out on the web on the future, Angus Logan and his team did a presentation on what is available to use and what sort of things can be done with the Live services. Live services allow developers and designers to use such things as Live Search, Virtual Earth and Live Messenger. A brilliant web site that uses the Virtual Earth feature is www.sportsdo.net where users use a GPS device to monitor their exercise routine and its then uploaded onto the sportsdo website, where other users can see a map of where you have ran and get statistics on your exercise. The great thing about this is that you still keep all the functionality of Virtual Earth such as 3D terrain and map overlays. Along with all of this there was a FREE Live streaming for Silverlight announced where users with a .NET passport can upload up to 4GB of Silverlight applications to the Live servers and then embed the applications onto their own site or blog. This also includes being able to upload Silverlight videos that can then be streamed directly from their site. This means that students and small companies can use this service and not have to spend tens of thousands on servers and web space. Instead the nice people at Microsoft will allow you to use their space and bandwidth. Information on the Live Services can be found at https://dev.live.com/.

The second day at MIX:UK started out with another set of presentations by Scott Guthrie, this time delving into Visual Studio 2008 and the new .NET 3.5 framework. With the presentation again being limited to a two hour slot we were only able to scratch the surface of all the new features in VS2008.

VS2008 brings brilliant WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functionality to Visual Studio for designing web pages, this is the same WYSIWYG that has been used in Expression Web. Meaning that it will be much easier for designers and developers to share common files, and produce better web apps. Along with the WYSIWYG features inherited from Expression Web, there is also the CSS support. With the CSS panel from Web being added to Visual Studio which means designers can see each of the styles on screen and easily select and use them. It was also demonstrated at how much easier this makes CSS to use, Scott was able to create a custom grid view by only visually using CSS in a matter of seconds.

LINQ is a feature of VS2008 which has certainly had a warm reception, this allows developers to use one common query language to query any type of data or object. Scott showed how LINQ can be used to query an object created in code, such as a list of people and instantly retrieve results. LINQ to SQL is one of the great aspects of LINQ which allows you to query a database with the same language you just searched your object, and in the background VS2008 turns this LINQ code into SQL, this can be displayed if you step through your program in debug mode. As well as LINQ to SQL there is talk of LINQ to AMAZON and many other data sets which will make it extremely easy for a developer to query any type of data. Along with LINQ Scott also gave us a quick look at Lambda Expressions and how they work. All information and more can be found on Scott’s blog here.

During MIX:UK my fellow MSP and myself were lucky enough to get an interview with Scott Guthrie, which I have to say that he was such a nice guy and we managed to do a brilliant interview with him. Talking about he started out as a developer, how he sees the development of applications going forward and also his best “freebee” he had received since working at Microsoft. This interview along with a more footage of MIX:UK will hopefully be shown soon on channel 8.

The sneak peak section at the end of the second day, gave us an insight into what Microsoft is currently working on with talks on multiprocessor development. An awesome app which using Silverlight allowed the user to look through a CT scan from multiple angles and depths which could be used so that specialist doctors all around the world can give opinions on patients. Microsoft Robotics Studio was also show with a robot being tested in a virtual environment before being released into the wild and controlled by an Xbox 360 controller. Not forgetting that we got a peak at some more Halo 3 footage, which by the looks of it promises to be a great game.

MIX:UK wasn’t all just about the new technologies coming out but was also a chance to have fun and get to know more people passionate about technology. At the end of the first day was the legendary Guitar Hero competition, where competitors showed off their axe skills in a chance to win goodies. Unfortunately my skills were not good enough to get me through to the finals, but I certainly enjoyed pretending to be a rock star. “Swaggily Fortunes” was another great game, where two teams faced off against each other answering tech related questions to win themselves and the audience a whole load of sway, including a great pair of Microsoft branded socks.

This was a great experience and I would recommend that if anyone has the chance to attend any Microsoft event to do so as they are really good fun as well as being able to see what new stuff is on the horizon. Hopefully I will be able to attend again next year to take the crown as Guitar Hero!

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