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Mix '07 Review

Ok…I’ve been promising this since I came back and certain people have made sure I didn’t forget my promise. ;-) So, here we go…my Mix ‘07 Review (namely regarding Silverlight).

First off, I love going to Mix. Microsoft really does a great job at the conference. There are some areas they could improve though; although some may not agree with my suggestion.

  1. The special event is never anything a fellow traveler (non-attendee) can attend. ‘06 was at Tao (the club inside of The Venetian). My wife (sometimes kids) travels with me, the majority of the time, and she couldn’t go. “She’s not an attendee so she shouldn’t be able to.” Yeah, sure…she isn’t. We’re just used to Max where we can buy a family/guest pass and go to the event. This year it was at another club (don’t recall which one off the top of my head). A non-attendee could go but not until 9:45. The club opened to the public at 10. How crappy was that?
  2. There simply were too many “marketing” preso’s. They were about dev’ (the one’s I attended) but spoke theory or marketability of the product too often. This may just be a “me” thing right here. I wanted to really sit down and geek out on the code. XAML isn’t foreign to me so I really wanted some more advanced topics and code sessions. It simply didn’t happen.
  3. WPF is an amazing technology and I felt it was short-changed this year. Last year WPF was the big huff and almost all sessions were WPF. This year…there were maybe 2 or 3 with Silverlight stealing the show (understandbly so) and a few Ajax sessions. The WPF sessions weren’t really about dev either. Vertigo had a session about their Family.Show which I missed (wish I hadn’t) and I think that was probably the biggest WPF preso available.

Ok…those are the complaints. None of those are showstoppers. The conference really was great regardless of those issues. Now, here are the highlights.

  1. SWEET Free stuff
  2. Seeing how Silverlight is evolving (here, here, and here).
  3. Learning more about ASP.NET Ajax (will cover more l8r in post)
  4. Low rate for The Venetian (what a nice hotel)

What everyone wants to really know is what I think about Silverlight as a whole. Well, you can see what I had to say after the first-day keynote. My thoughts still stand:

  • I’m curious to see how much marketshare Silverlight will get. Flash video is great…it really is. The biggest proponent to using it was ubiquity (how well it has penetrating the market) and a custom video player. Silverlight has the custom part and the ubiquity will come over time.
    • The ubiquity aspect can be an entirely different post but I’ll keep it to a sub-bullet. ;-) A lot of people may think Silverlight will be slow to adoption. I beg to differ. It won’t be nearly as fast as a new Flash player but with the HUGE market using ASP.NET, IIS, etc, etc, etc and all of these people installing Silverlight…how can it not gain penetration? Ok…moving on.
  • Silverlight video is just as good as Flash video. As note, the custom player is there now. The other big thing is the ability to play HD video. That is amazing for such an early release. Also think about the number of WMV’s in use right now on the Internet. Take those same WMV’s and create a Silverlight video player for it. MLB.tv has a sweet Silverlight app. Netflix has a sweet app I talked about here. Video share is an easy one to see Silverlight gaining.
  • RIA marketshare? Hrmm…interesting question. Silverlight version 1.0 CTP wasn’t worth looking at, IMO. You had to use Javascript+XAML to build apps. Terrible way to go for me. I didn’t give it the time or day. The comes Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. whoa…you mean I can build an RIA using C#? Python? VB? Ruby? What, more languages to come? What is this about? Cody covers the DLR in more detail. The bottom line is, Flash requires you to learn Actionscript. Not that it is a terribly hard language to learn if you have previous ECMA language experience (Javascript, C#, etc) then it isn’t too bad. Now, take Silverlight, the DLR, and a C# developer…what do you get? An RIA developer. Nothing new is needed. They need to learn XAML. That’s it. Natively they know how to manage events, etc so they can build an RIA very fast.

That’s some exciting stuff there. All of the Flash Killer talk is irrelevant. The best part is having another option. No longer do we have to force clients to use Flash and convert wmv’s to FLV. No longer do we have to force an ASP.NET client to use a non-Microsoft technology (some organizations are hard to adopt new tech’). This is a great year to be a developer. It is even better if you can code Flash/Flex and Silverlight. ;-)

Posted by John C. Bland II on May 17, 2007 11:52 AM |

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