News

A Data Center Built With Shipping Containers

Joshua Allen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:06:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft became the first in the industry to announce a data center designed entirely with shipping container-based server modules. It's a sizable data center, supporting somewhere between 150,000 an 440,000 servers. Mike Manos revealed some specifics about the Chicago data center at a talk at Data Center World.

James Hamilton has some commentary on his blog. James has been evangelizing the advantages of shipping container-based data centers for years, inside the company and within the industry. As he points out, several of the largest equioment companies are now providing containers, and you can be sure that we are not the only company buying them. But this is the first time anyone has talked publicly about a real industry-scale data center designed from the ground up for containers. I'm particularly interested by the fact that the containers use angle parking instead of being arranged at right angles.

This is a big accomplishment, and no doubt a sign of where the rest of the industry will be moving in coming years. Congratulations to Mike, James, and the rest of the team!

Fresh WPF Boot Camp at MIX University

Joshua Allen — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:57:00 GMT

Karsten just posted 3 more days of intense WPF Boot Camp training at MIX University. This is our most updated training, delivered recently here in Redmond by several experts from Microsoft and our partners. It takes you from beginner to intermediate in the first two days, and then dives deep into some real-world implementations on day 3.

The viewer is written using Silverlight 2, and you can get the source code for the viewer app over at Karsten's blog.

On the Road again....

Denise Begley — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:57:41 GMT

It was a tough choice on the night of Thursday, March 6, 2008. I was in the garage of the Venetian Hotel with Greg Visscher and my team mates Laurence Moroney and Arthur Yasinski and a tour bus (rumored to have been used by the band STYX). Could I stow away and travel for 45 days for a Code Trip adventure with seven Microsoft evangelists traveling the West promoting Microsoft technologies? It was tempting, especially as the tour goes through some of the cities I have lived in. (I am pointing to Missoula in the picture where I lived while studying at the University of Montana). With one more day of MIX and the finalists of Rock Band to be seen perform, I decided to live vicariously through the blog entries at: www.thecodetrip.com.

I heard that the bus may do a cross-country tour for PDC2008. Now that would be fun! Find me at PDC and I'll tell you stories of living on a bus for 18 months in Europe and North America.

Watch the MIX08 Keynotes in Hyperspeed

Joshua Allen — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:35:00 GMT

How did we take a boring old ballroom at the Venetian and convert it into an exciting and magical venue, replete with Scott Guthrie juggling and Steve Ballmer manhandling Guy Kawasaki's MacBook Air and cheering for web developers? Watch this short timelape video to see the whole process from bare ballroom through setup, rehearsals, keynotes, and then final teardown after the show.

If you want to see the keynotes at normal speed (or at 1.5x speed by playing in media player with ctrl+shift+g), you can view these links:

MIX08 Day 1 Keynote
MIX08 Day 2 Keynote
Keynote Highlight: Internet Explorer 8
Keynote Highlight: Silverlight Momentum
Keynote Highlight: Hard Rock
Keynote Highlight: Aston Martin
Keynote Highlight: NBC Olympics
Keynote Highlight: AOL
Keynote Highlight: DoubleClick
Keynote Highlight: Cirque
Keynote Highlight: Mobile Social Networking
Keynote Highlight: WeatherBug
Keynote Highlight: Nokia

WeatherBug MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:14:00 GMT

Here is the keynote footage from WeatherBug in the MIX08 keynote. You can see an in-depth interview with WeatherBug here.

Nokia MIX08 Keynote Announce

Joshua Allen — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:11:00 GMT

Here is the footage from Nokia's MIX08 Keynote announcement.

MIX08 Keynote: Dean Hachamovitch

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:30:00 GMT

This is the IE8 keynote from MIX08, led by Dean Hachamovitch. Dean talks about CSS, web standards, new AJAX features, and Activities and WebSlices.

MIX08 Keynote: Silverlight Montage

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:29:00 GMT

Here is a clip from the MIX08 keynote, showing a montage of masses of sites using Silverlight, followed by some announcements by Scott Guthrie.

MIX08 Keynote: Mobile Social Networking

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:22:00 GMT

Check out this footage from the MIX08 keynote; a mobile social networking application built in Silverlight by Stimulant and StepChange. You can also see an interview with the guys from Stimulant, or check out StepChange's OpenSpace presentation.

NBC Olympics in MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:09:00 GMT

The NBC Olympics demo was a highlight of the MIX08 keynote; an incredible media-viewing experience built in Silverlight. Here is the footage from the keynote. You can also see an interview with Perkins Miller talking about their solution here.

DoubleClick MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:06:00 GMT

DoubleClick demonstrates integration between Silverlight and their ad-tracking platform, in this clip from the MIX08 keynote.

Cirque MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:03:00 GMT

In the MIX08 keynote, Cirque showed off a WPF-based line-of-business application. Check out this clip and you might even spy one of our VPs trying out for a new career as a performer!

AOL MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:59:00 GMT

Here is the MIX08 keynote footage of AOL's mail client in Silverlight. You can see an interview with the AOL folks here, or watch the breakout session where they describe their lessons learned.

Aston Martin MIX08 Keynote

Joshua Allen — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:58:00 GMT

Here is the footage from Aston Martin's MIX08 keynote, showing the end-to-end experience from computer to auto with Silverlight. You can also see an interview with Aston and their agency, Splendid, here.

Some More Post-MIX08 Thoughts

Joshua Allen — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:21:00 GMT

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 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; 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.

Adaptive Path at MIX UX

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:37:00 GMT

The folks at Adaptive Path contributed to our new UX track at MIX08 with four full sessions on user experience. This was a slimmed-down yet intense version of their "UX intensive" course, tailored to be immediately relevant to both developers and designers.

Nishant sat down with Kim and Dan to get their thoughts about UX, career paths, and how to balance creativity with schedule pressures. It's a pretty interesting interview -- one cool factoid: developers outnumber designers 48:1 at Microsoft, while designers outnumber developers 25:1 at Adaptive Path!

Lou Carbone on Experience Engineering

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:22:00 GMT

Lou Carbone was one of the most popular presenters at MIX07, and we were really fortunate to have him present again this year as part of our new UX track. He delivered a well-received session, "Getting Clued in to Experience Engineering".

In addition to watching his session online, you can check out this interview conducted by Will Tschumy, to learn more about Lou and his work.

King of Kong Question and Answer

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:46:00 GMT

The night before the attempt to break the world-record at MIX08, the stars of "King of Kong" attended a special screening of the movie and took questions from the audience. Watch the full conversation here, and don't forget to check out the interview with Brian Keller.

King of Kong Interview

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:42:00 GMT

In this interview, Brian Keller talks to the stars of "King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters". They talk about how Steve's background in engineering contributes to his gameplay, his work as a science teacher, and the world-record attempt at MIX08.

DigiTurk Magazine Reader

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:28:00 GMT

DigiTurk is the first and only fully digital satellite television provider in Turkey. In addition to satellite TV for millions of customers in Turkey, they publish magazines and run DigiWeb portal. Like many other magazing publishers, DigiTurk saw value in using Silverlight to provide a richer reading experience. But they took the idea a step further, and built a tool which can be used by any magazine publisher to create Silverlight-based magazines.

Tim Sneath sat down with the team from DigiTurk to get a demo and hear about how they built this cool solution.

Fallen Angels win Rock Band at MIX08

Denise Begley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:21:00 GMT

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!

Show Off Winners Announced

Denise Begley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:22:00 GMT

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.

Crayon Physics Deluxe by Petri Purho
Real Time Physics in Silverlight by Bill Reiss, Andy Beaulieu and Jeff Webber
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.

Straight from Word to Web without Office: Intergen

Joshua Allen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:49:00 GMT

The Web is all about open formats like XML. When you combine open XML-based Office formats with a rich client technology like Silverlight, cool things are possible.

Tim Sneath sat down earlier this week with Chris Auld from Intergen, a New Zealand-based partner, to talk about TextGlow, a Silverlight-based viewer for Word documents built using the Open XML standard. This is a really interesting way to share documents on the Internet – there’s no need to install Office or convert the files to PDF format, since TextGlow can open and display the original document.

Ray Ozzie MIX08 Keynote Follow Up

Denise Begley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:05:00 GMT

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.

See More Partner Stories at MIX University

Joshua Allen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:28:00 GMT

We have seen a lot of what Silverlight can do here at Mix, and now you can see more real-world examples. Not only can you read the written case study, but you can view videos and listen to the different individuals who architected, developed and implemented the projects. You will hear directly from the project managers, designers and developers themselves. Check them out here!