1. Click here to view the application 
2. Dedicate a five dollar brick to a friend or loved one
3. Share the app with five of your friends

The person at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the project will get to dedicate the school, and everyone who donates will receive updates on the progress of the lab.

You see a lot about RIA online these days, even debates on the 3 letters, but Christophe Lauer has taken the initiative one step further and produced a RIA focused blog but in French (http://www.riactu.fr)

I have absolutely no clue what the heck he's saying in his blog posts as I'm limited to a mutated version of English we Aussies prefer to call "slang" but that being said, it's great to see RIA as a concept being translated and discussed by the French in French.

Those crazy french, what will they think of next.

Love your work Christophe!

P.S

The title translates to:
Microsoft met le I dans Rich International Applications. Allez RIA France!

More Info: http://www.riactu.fr

When I first started the RIA Evangelism role in Microsoft, I had this nagging feeling that the term RIA was just all over the place. Depending on which technology you are backing and which stream of alliance you uphold, the truth is the term was destined to be abused before it really took off.

I even tried to provoke conversation around it, by waving a big red flag and saying "Microsoft is about to use Rich Interactive not Rich Internet Application, debate me on it". Oh they debated me on it and lots of it, as the end conclusion was simply folks didn't care what the definition was, so long as we all understood Macromedia owned it in 2002. Such logic baffles me to this day.

I started to see some Adobe Staffers in many respects abuse the very term they acquired, by mixing the pool with Rich Branded Experiences against RIA, and if it had Flash - well it was RIA. I challenged many of them on that, and the result ended in personal character warfare.

After all these blog battles, arguments, debates and so on,  the term is becoming lost in the struggle over which technology is better than the other. The true essence of what I thought RIA stood for has now become a buzz word, much like the "Web 2.0" or "Social Networking". That's sad, not because I am attached to the term, but simply because it's a much easier way for customers to frame the conversation with other customers, and not have to spend time educating them.

Ryan Stewart, has recently tried his best to define the term RIA, but has failed. It's not that Ryan doesn't get it, but simply - who is he to define the term? (In that it's not about Ryan, but who is he to define it? debate that first and then follow up with a merit debate on the semantics of the term).

Some folks loyal to the Adobe cause will support him, others whom aren't will argue the point with him (have already). In the end, the term is now up for debate, with no single winner or owner but simply open for mob rule.

The team with the biggest horde will own the definition - for a while, that is until someone or something with large amount of credibility and marketing power will change the landscape once again.

Can you sit here and honestly blame Microsoft in many respects for leaning more towards the term Rich Client Platform vs RIA, sure it doesn't start the conversation with the right framing - as most regard RIA has holy and all that is good ( DO NOT TOUCH stickers are ready to put around it's term). Yet, Rich Client Platform is simply a way for us internally to define what it is we are setting out to do. To build a Rich Client Platform.

Welcome to the Internet, where a terms definitions is as good as those who lobby for it inside wikipedia. Mob rules.

Now that we know Google was a big loser in the 700MHz spectrum auction, many bloggers are acting like they knew it all along.  But the truth is, when we predicted that Google wouldn’t win any spectrum, there were only a small handful of people who agreed with us.  When I explained that Google's involvement was a PR stunt, most people were still fantasizing about the possibilities of Google-owned spectrum.

But it appears there is still some education to do.  The normally sober Ars Technica is now calling the loss a “coup” and claiming that Google is “ecstatic”.  As we explained, the PR stunt had rather limited success.  And in fact it appears to be worse than that.  We are seeing now that the much-vaunted open access requirements are open to serious interpretation.  I’m as much in favor of network neutrality as anyone, and I would love to report that Google’s PR stunt moved the needle significantly, but that simply wouldn’t be true.

Now Ars Technica and others are predicting that the latest effort, which includes Microsoft, Google, Intel and others, will have a serious impact on network neutrality.  That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.  And while Ars Technica can be forgiven for wishful thinking, I can’t say the same about others.  Once again, we are seeing reporters speculate that Google wants to get into network access business.  I already explained why Google doesn’t want to be in that business.

Rich user experiences are going mainstream on a wider variety of devices and putting pressure on web standards.  This trend is changing the face of the web as we know it, and we've covered this trend extensively here and at the MIX conferences.  But there is another trend that is also changing the web forever, and Ray Ozzie's keynote at MIX08 was a shot across the bow regarding Microsoft's response to this seismic shift.

In his keynote, Ray talked about the "mesh", and the inexorable shift of services into large centralized data centers.  We announced some cloud storage services, and discussed our philosophy of keeping control at the edges.  This is really just the beginning, and we'll be having a deep conversation with the industry over the next year.

To kick off the conversation here on MIX Online, I asked Greg Linden to share his broad industry perspective about some of these topics.  Greg led development of Amazon's ground-breaking recommender systems, created Findory, and recently joined Microsoft to work on some top-secret incubation projects.  He continues to run the popular "Geeking with Greg" blog, where he riffs on large-scale centralized computing, data mining, and "collective intelligence".

Just a few of the topics we talked about:

• Is MapReduce/Hadoop really as good as SQL?
• What are the limits of social search?
• What good is collective intelligence, anyway?
• Will all of the world get sucked into one or two datacenters?

MIX is over, but the reverberations continue.  You’ve no doubt seen the news articles highlighting IE8, Silverlight 2, and the now legendary Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki keynote.  And you probably know about the ReMIX events we’ll be hosting in your area.  But I wanted to point you to a number of other things you might have missed since MIX08 wrapped up.

For starters, a LOT of video from the Open Space sessions has been published.  You can watch all of the sessions here – there were nearly half as many attendee-driven Open Space sessions as “regular”sessions.  One of my favorite is Carl Franklin playing acoustic guitar – and we have to give props to the guy who plugged in his electric guitar in the middle of the sandbox area and started jamming.

In addition to the Open Space sessions, videos from all 16 of the “Show Off” contestants have been uploaded.  These are some fascinating and high-quality entries; view them all here.

While it was somewhat overshadowed by the IE8 and Silverlight 2 announcements, the SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) announcement during the keynote was significant.  Many news outlets picked up the story a few days later, and we saw some comparisons to a product from Amazon.  You will definitely want to read this reply from the SSDS team: “It is simple, but it is not SimpleDB”.

Shortly after the session on MySpace API’s, Vittorio Bertocci published some information that had been missing from the session.  The team at Microsoft.com video portal demonstrated yet another Microsoft property taking a bet on Silverlight.  And Marc Schweigert facilitated a team of 11 CodePlex developers building an IntelliSense library for Virtual Earth.

Many people attended both MIX08 and SXSW, and it was fun to watch the tweets.  Particularly when Chris Wilson told the guys from Opera and Mozilla to watch sessions.visitmix.com, or when the ultimate Phizzpop design challenge took place at Maggie Mae’s.  We’re looking forward to next year, with SxSWi running from March 13-17^th, and MIX09 from March 18^th-20^th.

Expression Studio Beta (download)
The second release of Expression Studio adds a wealth of new features including support for Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology across all the tools. Enhanced designer developer workflow makes the process of building great user experience even better!  If you’d only like to install individual components of Expression Studio (Web, Blend, Design, Media, Encoder), go here.
NOTE: ASP.NET 3.5 is required as a pre-requisite to install Expression.

Expression Media 2 for MAC (download)
Expression Media 2 now allows catalogues to be shared amongst team members with file locking and improved network performance. Improved keywording of assets, new file formats and the ability to share photos as Silverlight galleries once you have sorted them on the new multi-monitor light table!

IE 8 Beta (download)
Over the last ten years the intensity of web usage and reliance on the web have increased dramatically.  The evolution of the web has introduced a new set of opportunities, immersive experiences, online services and standards. Daily life without the web is simply hard to imagine.  •       Interoperability and Compatibility
•       Browser capabilities that enable new, innovative experiences
•       Built in tools that help both first time and experienced developers and designers get pages built
Internet Explorer 8 will take the web experience beyond the page and introduce a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or an end-user discovering a new online service.

IE 8 Virtual Machines (download)
The IE VPC’s allow designers and developers to test their sites on multiple versions of the browser, without having IE installed side by side.  There are workarounds to get IE installed side by side, but they are unsupported and don’t necessarily work the same way as IE6, IE7 or IE8 would work when installed properly. The best way to use multiple versions of IE on one machine is via virtualization. Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2007 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, with either IE6, IE7 or IE8 to help facilitate your testing and development.

Expression Blend 2.5 Preview (download)
Use Expression Blend 2.5 to create and modify managed Silverlight 2-based applications. Expression Blend 2.5 for Silverlight 2 includes all of the features in Expression Blend 2 but has not reached the quality level of Expression Blend 2 for WPF or Silverlight 1 development.

Deep Zoom Composer (download)
We are pleased to present a technology preview of Deep Zoom Composer, a tool to allow the preparation of images for use with the Deep Zoom feature currently being previewed in Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The new Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight allows users to see images on the Web like they never have before. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing should be. High resolution images need to be prepared for use with Deep Zoom and this tool allows the user to create Deep Zoom composition files that control the zooming experience and then export all the necessary files for deployment with Silverlight 2.

Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008  (download)
This package is an add-on to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2008 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 2 Beta 1. It provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.  The components included are:

• Visual Basic and C# Project templates
• Intellisense and code generators for XAML
• Debugging of Silverlight applications
• Web reference support
• Integration with Expression Blend

Note: this will also install Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1, KB949325 for Visual Studio 2008.

Silverlight 2 SDK Beta 1  (download)
If you are not installing the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 which includes the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK, you can download this SDK to create Silverlight Web experiences that target Silverlight 2 Beta 1. The SDK contains documentation, samples and other tools for building Silverlight applications.

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2  (download)
ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable components for application design, processing logic, and display. ASP.NET MVC also greatly facilitates test -driven development (TDD).

ASP.NET server controls for Silverlight (included as part of Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 download)
You can integrate the rich behavior of Microsoft Silverlight into your Web application by using the familiar model of ASP.NET server controls. The MediaPlayer server control lets you integrate media sources such as audio (WMA) and video (WMV) and take advantage of rich built-in media player skins. The Silverlight server control lets you add your own Silverlight XAML content to ASP.NET pages, using a custom JavaScript type or a Silverlight 2 managed-code XAP package.

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview (December 2007) (download)
The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is a preview of new functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET. The release includes the ADO.NET Entity Framework runtime, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and new additions to ASP.NET AJAX.

Dan Roam, author of the new book, "The Back of the Napkin", was at MIX08 to contribute to our new UX track.  The feedback from attendees about his unique presentation was overwhelmingly positive.  We caught up with him in the hallway to ask about his book, his session, and some of his philosophy about design

The Fallen Angels won the Rock Band event at MIX08 on Thursday night with 992,204 points! The Angels formed here at MIX08 and practiced pretty much every break between sessions.  They actually picked a song they’d never played together at the last minute after the band leader Rich got a tip from his 10 year old son that the song The Outlaws - “Green Grass & High Tides” had the best scoring opportunity.  They were actually 1 note away from 1M points on the final solo!  Whoa!  And that was on Medium difficulty!  They drew straws and Ben, the drummer, walked away with the Strat.  He mentioned “I guess I’ll need to take lessons!”.

During the encore performance on Friday morning the Fallen Angels broke their award-winning record with over 1,000,000 points!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks to everyone who came out to Show Off last night. We had some great entries, and we hope everyone enjoyed the limited edition t-shirts. We showed off 16 videos and after tallying the votes, we have three audience favorites.

1. Crayon Physics Deluxe by Petri Purho
2. Real Time Physics in Silverlight by Bill Reiss, Andy Beaulieu and Jeff Webber
3. Wii Data Visualization and Multipoint Nonsense by Matthias Shapiro

Congratulations to our winners who will each receive a $500 gift card. Watch for all of the videos on www.visitmix.com soon.

The Web has created a common vocabulary for publishers to distribute content and applications to billions of browsers around the world.  But people sometimes forget that the Web has also created a vocabulary for reaching beyond the browser -- to devices, gadgets, and services.

WeatherBug, who make some of the most popular weather tracking gadgets, are a prime example of this.  Rather than seeing Silverlight as a competitor to the web, they realize that Silverlight gives them a way to extend their existing web services beyond the web browser.

Check out this interview and demo of the apps that WeatherBug built using Silverlight -- all re-using and leveraging existing Web Services.

During Wednesday's keynote, Ray Ozzie mentioned an exciting offering that we will be making available in the near future through an invitation only Technology Preview program.  Click here to log-in to CommNet and start the sign-up process.  This special preview is limited to 2000 participants, so sign up soon to ensure your space in the program!

A note for our friends outside of the United States… the first phase of this technology preview is not available internationally.  However, please complete the sign-up process and we will notify you as soon as this offering is available in your country.

Join us for one hour of attendee-created entertainment, movie candy, popcorn and sodas at Show Off.

MIX08 attendees will inspire you with their unique software, tips, tools, techniques, animations, or anything else they thought of. Each entry is a short, 3-minute-or-less video demonstrating what they wanted to show off.

Three winners will walk with $500 USD Visa Gift Cards.