MIX07

Scott Guthrie talks about the future or ASP.NET and Orcas

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:17:36 GMT

The ReMix event was nice, well, not really comparable to Las Vegas, of course, but it was nice to see the demos again. For me, in fact, the real opportunity was rather to connect with other people interested in these technologies, and in this aspect it was really nice. I've been wanting to meet Ronnie Saurenmann (the guy behind the Zurich Airport XBAP and the "Outlook-like" WPF hands-on lab) for quite some time, I hope for the beginning of a nice collaboration. Of course the icing on the cake was to be able to meet ScottGu "in real" as opposed to the email contact we've been having so far. I didn't want to talk about it before because I didn't want to jinx it, but I had the pleasure of spending approximately 45 minutes with Scott and talk about our project and the future developments of WPF, XBAPs, Silverlight. This has een the subject of many a discussion I had these last months, and it's really nice to get confirmation by Scott himself that we're actually on the right track. It also confirmed what I already knew, that Scott is a really nice guy (additionally to being an amazing software specialist), and that he invests a lot of precious time to make sure that we (customers and community) are satisfied with the products he supervises.

After the ReMix event and after our talk, Scott presented the future of ASP.NET and Orcas in front of a large audience from the .NET Managed User Group of Switzerland. The talk was great, as usual, and we saw a lot of on-the-fly coding, which was very impressive. A big emphasis was put on LINQ, which really sounds very interesting. I almost wish I had a project with DB interactions going on, maybe I'll have to invent something in that direction to experiment with the technology. It was especially impressive to see how you can "translate" tables to objects by using a schema, including relationships using keys, then using these objects to write LINQ queries in an OO way, and then even modifying and saving the changes to the DB, all without writing one line of SQL code. The ability to debug all this and watch the produced SQL query (hover on the query's result and click to display the query itself and its result in tabular form) makes it easier to understand the LINQ syntax. Of course the ability to query against all kind of object stores is too good to be true (and yet it is...): Query against any kind of collection, of XML files, of DB or of web services!

A new control being delivered with ASP.NET was also shown: ListView. This panel allows defining templates for the container and for the items, and databinding to a LINQ data source for example. The data binding can be done in source code, or by using a new DataSource: LinqDataSource.

Finally, we saw a lot of JavaScript debugging, Intellisense, inline XML documentation and all kind of goodies which would have been so good 5 years ago when we started developing our web application (so now that we have Silverlight with .NET, you give us with JavaScript intellisense???? :-)

I'll need some time to digest all the information received today, I guess, but what I really enjoyed the most was all the great people met. It's a pleasure to be part of this community!

PS: It's my first post using LiveWriter and I think I am already hooked. Now I need to figure a way to blog into here and to then import the blogs in my RealSimpleBlog!!

ReMix 07 in Zurich with Scott Guthrie

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:04:07 GMT

Today, the ReMix 07 event is taking place in the World Trade Center in Zurich, Switzerland. Lots of great speaker, includign Scott Guthrie, Wayne Smith, Beau Ambur and more.

Wayne Smith just showed his video encoding and XAML editing demo, pretty much the same demo as in Vegas, but very well received here anyway! You got to love his accent :) but more important, the content is great.

One new thing presented today compared to the Las Vegas edition is a new plug-in for LiveWriter which allows embedding Silverlight streaming video into a blog entry. This LiveWriter is really beginning to appeal to me more and more for blogging, just have to find a way to integrate the output with my RealSimpleBlog control running on my webpage... I have started experimenting with Sliverlight videos, including adapting the XAML player overlays to my desires, and I should be able to show something soon on my PhotoAlbum.

Silverlight videos uploaded to the Live Silverlight account are cached worldwide and distributed by global point-of-presence, which should enable a very smooth experience.

Scott is now making a demo of how to create a Silverlight application. This is again very much like the Vegas demo he did, so that's a good moment to post this :-) I will post more about this event later.

Oh, just before I hit the send button, Scott just showed the remote debugging of a Sliverlight application running on a Macintosh, and again it just blows me away how easy that is! Great work, really.

ReMix Zurich tomorrow

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 06:39:24 GMT

ReMix 07 Zurich

I will be attending ReMix in Zurich tomorrow. This event will be specially interesting this year due to the presence of Scott Guthrie for the keynote and 2 presentations. I'll hear even more of Scott in the evening, at the DotMugs (.NET Managed User Group of Switzerland) where he will be speaking about ASP.NET and Orcas. I am very happy to hear Scott again, this will be the thrid time (after MIX06 and MIX07), and I sure hope I will have many more occasions!

MIX day 3 (cont)

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 04 May 2007 06:59:16 GMT

Gee, I almost forgot one session I attended:

Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE

Once again a nice demo, concentrating on the specific problems and challenges you encounter when you develop 3D applications. Nathan designed beautiful glass tubes which are filled with data. I loved his mention that in WPF, he is actually working with materials and textures. When he says that, I get the impression that his working is actually sculpting 3D objects. I think that software programming is a very artistic activity, And I think that this is true with WPF even more than with any other technology I used before.

Also very interesting: When you want a 3D application, you need to understand 3D. This is not just a matter of adding 3D support to a 2D application. You have to think in 3d from the start, and that includes the requirement stage too. What is 3D adding to your project? How can you use 3D to actually express something? I think that an example of a bad use of 3D is the Excel pie charts. I mean, what does it bring to your graph? Nothing. If anything, it makes it more confusing for the user, because it adds an information, but it's an empty information. So really, use 3D wisely.

Now in Chicago

After Vegas, I made the trip to our headquarters in the Chicago suburb Buffalo Grove. Staying there 2 days gave me the occasion to catch up with my colleagues and to try to give them some of the excitement that I have been feeling these last days. Anyway, I am flying back tonight and will reach home tomorrow morning. I hope I'll get some sleep on the plane, well, maybe. We'll see :-)

It was a great trip, and I am happy I had also the occasion to spend a few hours in Chicago downtown. I made a lot of pictures, I will try to post them today before I fly, not sure if that'll work out.

MIX day 3

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:46:13 GMT

Today was MIX's last day, and it's almost painful to have to leave. I can't believe how fast it went, how packed with information it was, and how many great people I had the chance to meet. To all of you, I want to say thanks for the great time I spent here. The organization was, as usual, spotless. Now I have so much information to process and sort, this will keep me busy for a long time... Oh how I hope to make it to MIX08 ;-)

Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight

If I had to choose the most exciting session of the whole conference, it might be this one. I don't think that most people actually totally understand what Silverlight will enable them to do in the web browser. You see, the fancy UI, media, animation, that's all great, but Silverlight brings something more to the web client: It brings the .NET framework to it! It's also very nice to see that they actually do it in a very clever way: The integration in the browser is much more than just a set of API, like LiveConnect for Java applets. In fact, the collaboration JavaScript - Silverlight is very deep and if not totally seamless, at least it is very comfortable. What we saw this morning was alpha stuff, but it already demonstrated a great level of completion, and a very clean feeling. What I wrote about yesterday still applies:

"As we progress through the conference, I have been thinking a lot about the future of JavaScript. As you may know, I really like JavaScript. It's been with JavaScript that I started making my first contibutions to the programming community already more than 10 years ago. I really love that language and have been evangelizing it quite a lot within Siemens. But now I think that I'll find myself using C# on the target web browser more. This is actually what I have done already years ago with Java and LiveConnect. Java has the ability to do things that JavaScript cannot: Open sockets to the server, read and parse server-side files, etc. So I made invisible applets (1*1 pixels, and getting the same background color as the page). However, the communication Java - JavaScript using LiveConnect was always cumbersome. Silverlight pushes this a lot further, and allows direct access, because the Silverlight DOM is totally exposed to JavaScript. Also, you can hook JavaScript event handlers to Silverlight events, and you can also hook Silverlight event handlers to HTML events. Honestly, if I had to choose one feature that really tops all others in this conference, that's the one."

Everybody I talked to is very excited about this. JavaScript is definitely not past anymore (if anything, we need to have some kind of fallback scenario if Sliverlight runtime is not available, and also JavaScript will be used to update the HTML front-end where available Of course there will be pure Silverlight pages like there are now pure Flash pages, but I think that the best will probably be to mix HTML and XAML for the UI. Simlarly, probably the best model for the code will be a mix of JavaScript and C#. Oh, exciting times are coming!!

Very nice attribute: [Scriptable]. This attribute, when added to a C# event, for example, makes JavaScript able to subscribe to this event!

ALso nice to hear: Silverlight relies very much on JSON. For example, a JavaScript serializer and deserializer is provided, and allows passing complex object types from JavaScript to .NET (simple types can be passed directly, and support for additional types will be added as time goes).

Additionally, WCF also supports JSON: The SoapHttpClientProtocol is actually using JSON, with the MIME type "application/json" and supports synch and async communication. SO using WCF; SIlverlight can communicate with ASP.NET application services.

Also, Silverlight provides access to the IsolatedStorage. A great use for that feature: A "super cookie": What you save in IsolatedStorage from one web browser can be retrieved from another web browser running on the same PC. Ever wanted to share information between IE and Firefox? Well, just save it in an isolated file in one browser, and retrieve it from the IsolatedStorage in the other browser!

Finally, an OpenFileDialog is provided, and allows a much better support for simultanous uploads to the server. Security was observed, and the OpenFileDialog provides read-only access to the selected file. Additionally, no path information is provided to the Silverlight application, only the file name.

Leaving... :-(

Voilà, it's time for me to get back to reality. I'll be headed to Chicago first, where we have our US headquarters, and where I will spend two days with my US colleagues on the project. On Friday evening I get back to Switzerland.

MIX07 day 2

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:01:26 GMT

On Tuesday, most of the day was packed with sessions. I managed to see very interesting information. Microsoft is really pushing SIlverlight a lot, and while it's great news for web applications, I really hope that they will not release their effort on WPF. We're waiting for V2!!

Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Part 1 of 2)

This session was most probably great for developers without experience with WPF. For me, however, after a certain point, I found myself thinking "I know all that already". And then I suddenly realized that it is actually great: It means that the Silverlight programming model in .NET is so close from full-featured WPF that the learning curve is actually very small. This is a great realization.

As we progress through the conference, I have been thinking a lot about the future of JavaScript. As you may know, I really like JavaScript. It's been with JavaScript that I started making my first contibutions to the programming community already more than 10 years ago. I really love that language and have been evangelizing it quite a lot within Siemens. But now I think that I'll find myself using C# on the target web browser more. This is actually what I have done already years ago with Java and LiveConnect. Java has the ability to do things that JavaScript cannot: Open sockets to the server, read and parse server-side files, etc. So I made invisible applets (1*1 pixels, and getting the same background color as the page). However, the communication Java - JavaScript using LiveConnect was always cumbersome. Silverlight pushes this a lot further, and allows direct access, because the Silverlight DOM is totally exposed to JavaScript. Also, you can hook JavaScript event handlers to Silverlight events, and you can also hook Silverlight event handlers to HTML events. Honestly, if I had to choose one feature that really tops all others in this conference, that's the one. I just went to another session called "Extending the browser's programming model with Silverlight", and I will write more about this soon, so stay tuned.

Oh, BTW: When you work with Silverlight on .NET, you must add references to the System DLL and also mscorlib. However, there is a different version of them for Silverlight. So the way it works is: The libraries don't have all the .NET 3.0 classes, but eventually the CLR engine is exactly the same as the full blown WPF one. This is a great model for extensibility.

Design Rich Client Experiences with Expression Blend and WPF

This session was rather meant for designers, but I had a lot of fun anyway.

Side note: We got some rubber bracelets with different colors: Yellow for designers, Blue for developers and Green for business. I decided to make a statement and to wear one blue and one yellow, and to fully embrace my devigner identity ;-)

So anyway. The session showed a lot of using Blend, and it really made me realize that so far, I only touched the surface of what you can do with that tool. That leads us to the "motto du jour": Keep your projects blendable as long as possible. If you data bind in XAML, you need to come up with a kind of simulation data making you able to see the data items in Blend as you design them. That's a trick that I don't master yet, I'll need to test this more.

Developing ASP.NET AJAX Controls with Silverlight

I am a big fan of Nikhil Kothari, and it was great to see him again do a very nice session. Nikhil showed how to use ASP.NET controls to integrate Silverlight in a web page. There are two basic controls allowing you to very easily add Silverlight experience to your web page: XAML control and Media control

These two controls allow a fairly unexperienced developer to easily integrate Silverlight in the page. The Media control, for example, comes with skins, and these skins can be controlled using ASP.NET control properties. So you can use pre-designed skins.

There is, however, more than that: You can actually edit the XAML skins files in the Expression tools, and basically you have 100% control over the code! This is great for people confident with XAML and the Expression tools.

Lessons Learned: Designer/Developer Productivity in Windows Presentation Foundation

Great session again by IdentityMine. Especially great to hear about my biggest interest of the moment, how to improve designer-developer collaboration in WPF.These guys have a huge experience in the subject. We also heard about the newest product shipped by IdentityMine, a set of controls which will no doubts be very useful in many WPF projects. The package is called "Blendables". Learn more about it on www.blendables.com.

One blendable I love: EvalBinding. This markup extension allows you to specify expressions in your bindings! Tired of writing converters: Then EvalBinding is for you. For example:

{b:EvalBinding [(double) Column1.Width + (double) Column2.Width]}

General session

I attended only the first 20 minutes or so of the general session. The first part was OK, with Disney demonstrating a Vista gadget they implemented. This gadget is especially used in HongKong, where Disney needs to advertise their Disneyland, but where broadband is not widely available. People in HongKong often go to Internet cafés to have broadband. The gadget makes the Disney marketing available easily to these computers.

After a while, though, I started to feel a little tired of the marketing talk... So I decided to go and take a walk on the strip, and had a great time taking pictures and observing that amazing place.

Dinner with Infragistics

After my walk, I had dinner with people form Infragistics, who also just released V1 of their WPF controls set. Lots of great stuff to play with, and they are currently working a lot of these controls and also whole new ones. It's certainly great to see all big names in the .NET world coming up with tons of applications and controls.

Cirque du Soleil

To conclude a great and packed day, I crossed the road to Treasure Island and had a great time watching the late show of Cirque du Soleil Mystere. It was simply fantastic. I had seen Ka last year, and liked it but Mystere is very different, much more circus-like (though à la Cirque du Soleil, so with a lot of amazing costumes aqnd props). When the show was over, I was sure only one hour had passed, but no, actually it had been going on for two full hours. Make sure to catch one of these shows when you're in Vegas, it's really worth it.

MIX day 1 (cont again)

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 01 May 2007 07:52:40 GMT

I attended 3 sessions yesterday afternoon, all very interesting.

MySpace megasite

Quite interesting talk by the MySpace team about what strategies they are using to run, maintain and upgrade what must be one of trhe busiest website worldwide. The sheer volume of video, MP3 and pictures theys deliver simultanously is tremendous. And all that runs on ASP.NET and Microsoft platforms. Very impressive. They also developed their own tools for code management, allowing to release and if necessary rollback code.

It was nice to see that session because I had attended last year's same session, so we could see the progression.

The future of webcomic reading

Great session! Nathan Dunlap and Robbie Ingebretsen from IdentityMine had prepared an excellent show. I love to see these two talk because Nathan is probably one of the best UI designer around, and Robbie one of the best developers (with a very, very strong skill for design too) Both were part of the Microsoft WPF team and designed/implemented a lot of features, so they know the stuff from the inside. I feel privileged to have built a great relationship with them since the course IdentityMine gave us in Tacoma last month.
Their presentation was actually made using the webcomic reader that they were also demonstrating. It's hard to describe how good the presentation was, so you should definitely check it by yourself when it will be posted on visitmix.com.
They also handed out goodies, among them the first edition (on paper) of the IdentityMen comic, the comic they used for the presentation. Also available was a card allowing to download their Blendable controls, a newly released set of controls with a lot of great simple but useful ideas. Make sure you check it out on www.blendables.com/.

Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications

Great session too, by Anders Hejlsberg himself. Anders is the C# chief architect, and gave us a very short intro followed by a huge demo demonstrating the abilities of LINQ. I am very much looking forward to work with LINQ, especially to simplify greatly the tedious task of parsing XML files and creating CLR objects. Yes, LINQ can also be used for this! The thing I like is the possibility to use the same syntax to query against any kind of datastore, including XML, CLR objects (any IEnumerable) or of course relational databases.

Freebies

A nice "side effect" to coming to MIX, I am going back home with a free copy of Vista Ultimate and of Expression Studio. That's good value :-)

IdentityMine party at Zeffirino

To end a great day, I was invited to IdentityMine's party at Zeffirino, an italian restaurant in the Grand Canal shoppe area. Thjis place is surreal, because the ceiling is painted blue with clouds, and even late it feels like it's middoe of the afternoon.

The dinner went great, I was sitting at a table with guys from ElectricRain (the makers of Zam3D), from FrogDesign, and from IdentityMine. I had a great discussion about the integrator role, the designer - developer collaboration, really the level of experience and of knowledge at that table was just huge. I felt very humble, but I had a great time!

Finally, I made it back to my room, but unfortunately I slept only 3.5 hours before the jet lag woke me up... and to think that I am going out again tonight (I have a ticket for Le Cirque du Soleil Mistery) (I know, noone forces me)

MIX pictures on Flickr and on my PhotoAlbum

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 01 May 2007 02:11:37 GMT

I just posted a bunch of pictures from yesterday on Flickr and on my PhotoAlbum. More pictures will follow shortly. Stay tuned.

MIX: Debugging remotely from VS2005 on a Mac!!

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:04:20 GMT

I know, I posted about this already, but this is so great it deserves a separate post: Using Visual Studio 2005, you can actually remotely attach to a Silverlight process running on a Mac, and debug!

Isn't that cross platform pushed to the max??

MIX: Day one review (morning)

Laurent Bugnion — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:46 GMT

Amazing day yesterday.

It all started with a great breakfast set up by the Venetian team. They really do an amazing job. The hotel is just great, not only because it's so big and luxurious, but also because every details is taken care of, every detail is perfect. I had the same impression last year, impression confirmed.

The key note was great, though to be fair last year's was better. Ray Ozzie just cannot beat Bill Gates, charisma wise. I was very happy to see Scott Guthrie on stage again, this guy is my hero. Honestly, he is my role model. His demos were great, mostly focused on Silverlight, and also on the interaction Silverlight - ASP.NET. Honestly, very exciting times are coming for web developers. I am so happy to be part of this.

A few quotes from Ray Ozzie's speech: (the non-bold words are mine)

"Universal web versus Experience First" - Or in other words thin client versus RIAs
"Software + Service pattern" - This is definitely where Microsoftr is heading.
"Unprecedented number of technology choice." - Scott underlined that too. It's not anymore a battle of survival (Windows vs Mac, Silverlight vs Flash...) but a world where developers are free to choose which technology they want to use.

Also, Ray mentioned the days when documents and numbers were fueling web development. Today it's media, rich content, even in business applications. I think it totally makes sense.

Scott's demos

Scott G made tons of demos, and also invited other people on stage. There were a few big news, like SIlverlight tools having been made available for downloads (add-in in VS2005 among other stuff), Of course the biggest of all was SIlverlight being now available with .NET support, on Windows and on the Mac! The download is very tiny, so installing the plugin needs very little time.

Remote debugging Silverlight on a Mac!

One of the most exciting things we saw was Scott running a Silverlight application on a Mac, and using the VS2005 debugger on a remote Windows PC to attach to the Mac process! Yes, you can remotely debug Silverlight while it runs on the web!!!

JavaScript against .NET

Scott wrote a chess application where the .NET engine can play against the JavaScript engine, using the exact same heuristics. This was a good demo of how much faster the .NET engine is compared to the JavaScript engine. You all know me as a lover of JavaScript, but I must say that it's getting hard slowly to find the motivation to keep writing script when you see what Silverlight on .NET can do.

NETFLIX demo

NETFLIX hired Razorfish to develop their next generation viewing experience online. Cool stuff: View a movie in Silverlight, skip to chapters, skip to time (very fast and smooth!). WIth a buddys' list, you can see what your buddies are watching, and you can even start the same movie and synchronize, so you and your buddy are watching the same movie "together". Also, an instant messenger is integrated. And to be clear again, all this is embedded in a web browser! The demo implied one guy viewing on a Mac and the other on a PC, synchronizing, chatting...

Developer - Designer collaboration

You know it's one of my favourite subjects lately.Silverlight of course enables this by enjoying the whole range of tools, from Expression Design for XAML assets, Expression Blend for integration, Expression Media for encoding, Expression Web and Visual Studio for the ASP.NET design. That said, Silverlight can very well be developed and compiled on a Mac, without any development environment, like Scott demonstrated.

One CLR

By the way, Silverlight uses the exact same CLR engine as .NET. Less libraries are available, but that's the only limitation (well, that and the sandbox).

Pure client, but can be integrated tightly with ASP.NET

Since Silverlight is pure client technology, it can be deployed from just any server (pretty much like XBAPs today). However you can create a solution with a Silverlight project and a ASP.NET application, create web references, and tightly integrate the SIlverlight control in an ASPX page.
We saw a great demo of an airline schedule application in the browser, with animated planes flying, integration with a XAML Calendar control, beautiful.

Expression Media

I am very excited about Expression Media. Can't wait to play with it. Wayne Smith, Group product manager at Microsoft made a great demo of how you can encode almost on the fly a preview, and then compare the encode, lower quality movie side by side with the original. When I say side by side, I mean one picture, one splitter which you can actually move while the movie is playing, allowing you to compare the qualities in a totally smooth way.

CBS demo

CBS (TV broadcaster) was there too, and showed us how they will integrate amateur content (news videos shot by you and I) into their own HD content. Uploading will be done using Silverlight.

Metaliq demo

Beau AMbur from Metaliq showed us a cool online tool that they did in 3 weeks. This tool allows you to load videos, edit them, combine them, see a filmstip allowing you to cut precisely where you want to, all of this running in the browser. Very nice really. We saw 9 videos running together, with no noticeable delay or flickering. The tool's footprint is 50KB.

.NET for Ruby

Continuing the last years progress in opening their technology to other platforms, .NET is now available for Ruby too. Scott demoed that, and it really works (in case you doubted it ;-) I am not a Ruby guy myself, but I can see how that is going to attract lots of great developers to the .NET world. Good job.

MLB.com

Finally, we saw a demo of MLB, major league baseball, and the site they're preparing to broadcast the games live online. Excellent application, with stats overlays, a great looking UI, priority given to the content... We also saw a mobile phone demo, where the site is very much functional and even videoclips are available for viewing.

And now?

The roadmap was also unveiled, though without strict deadlines.

Silverlight V1.0 this summer
Expression Media encoder V1 this summer too
Silverlight V1.1 will also include mobile support

That's a pretty long post so I'll write more about yesterday afternoon later today!