MIX Online

Web Accessibility with Cynthia Shelly

Joshua Allen — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:07:00 GMT

Cynthia Shelly has worked with web accessibility both inside Microsoft and with our partners. She currently works in the Accessible Business Unit; the team who bring you the accessibility center on MSDN, among other things.

Cynthia recently joined me in the MIX Online studios to discuss her work with web accessibility at Microsoft; from common issues and problems she has seen in Microsoft web sites as well as external sites, to her work as part of the Windows Live Writer team. Live Writer was a fascinating example, since it's a tool which allows people to create accessible web content, which itself is accessible -- attention to both sides of the equation that is often overlooked.

A Startup A Week - Episode 1 Day 5

Kevin Leneway — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:12:00 GMT

With less than eight hours to go, the team comes together one last time for the conclusion to Episode One of "A Startup A Week". The concept of the show is to bring together top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

Today the team prepares for the final presentation to the head of the Seattle chapter of the non-profit Room to Read. Our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia.

If you're watching this video right now, chances are that you had access to a computer when you were a child - or your children have access today. In just five minutes, you can help be a part of a community that will share that gift with real children living in Cambodia right now. Here's how:

Click here to view the application
Dedicate a five dollar brick to a friend or loved one
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.

Thanks for watching the pilot episode of A Startup A Week, and be sure to check out the first four days of the project via the links below:

Click here to watch the Day 1 video
Click here to watch the Day 2 video
Click here to watch the Day 3 video
Click here to watch the Day 4 video

A Startup A Week - Episode 1 Day 4

Kevin Leneway — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:59:00 GMT

It's Thursday and the team has just one day remaining to complete their project for "A Startup A Week". The concept of the show is to bring together a few rockstar developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

For the initial project of this series, our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia via the non-profit Room to Read. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving shows how he used LINQ and SQL Server to keep track of donations, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives us a very quick sneak preview of his awesome design, and Kyle Cressman sits down with our special guest Dominic Canterbury from D/C Strategic.

With less than 48 hours remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for the finale tomorrow, and be sure to check out the first three days of A Startup A Week - Episode One.

Click here to watch the Day 1 video
Click here to watch the Day 2 video
Click here to watch the Day 3 video

A Startup A Week - Episode 1 Day 3

Kevin Leneway — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:06:00 GMT

It's Wednesday and the team has reached the halfway point of the project on "A Startup A Week". The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle's top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

The team has been working on Facebook application that allows users to work together with their social networks on a Room to Read fundraising campaign to build a computer lab in Cambodia. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving sets up the donation system with a great PayPal hack, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives a 3D preview of the virtual computer lab, and our marketing expert Kyle Cressman calls up the non-profit Room to Read to get their support.

With only three days remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for new episodes each day this week to find out!

Click here to watch the Day 1 video
Click here to watch the Day 2 video

Microsoft putting the I in Rich International Applications. Go RIA France!

Scott Barnes — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:58:00 GMT

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

A Startup A Week - Episode 1 Day 2

Kevin Leneway — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:49:00 GMT

We're back with day two of a new online reality show called "A Startup A Week". The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle's top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

Today the team got started building out the Facebook application. Our developer Adam walks through the basics of setting up a Facebook app using Visual Studio 2008, our designer Jay gives a 3D preview of the virtual computer lab, and our producer Stephen runs into the first setback of the project.

With only four days remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for new episodes each day this week to find out!

A Startup A Week - Episode 1 Day 1

Kevin Leneway — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:16:00 GMT

Today I'm happy to announce the pilot episode of a new online reality show called "A Startup A Week". The concept of the show is to bring together a few of Seattle's top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

For the first episode, we headed down to Design Commission, a design agency in Seattle's historic Pioneer Square district. The team met up on Monday morning and we started filming. In today's episode, we'll introduce the team, unveil the idea, and get started with an initial brainstorming session. Can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for new episodes each day this week to find out!

RIA is slowly fading in terms of it's definition.

Scott Barnes — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:25:00 GMT

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.

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!

Google Loses, and Net Neutrality Doesn't Win

Joshua Allen — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:35:00 GMT

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.

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.

Greg Linden: Trends in Collective Intelligence and Centralization

Joshua Allen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:02:00 GMT

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?

Design Leaders at Microsoft: Eric Zocher and Steven Guttman

Joshua Allen — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:57:00 GMT

The Seattle Times yesterday wrote about the growing influence of design leaders inside Microsoft. Two of the prime examples of this trend are Eric Zocher, General Manager for Expression Suite, and Steven Guttman, Product Unit Manager for Expression Web.

Eric runs the overall team who ship all of our design tools; a sort of "startup within Microsoft". Steven runs the team who build Expression Web -- a product that wins kudos for web standards support, and spontaneous applause for PHP support :-)

Nishant spoke with them about what it's like to build these products within Microsoft, about the recent launch of the Expression community site, and more. I have a feeling we'll be hearing a lot more from both of these guys in the future!

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.

David Armano

Joshua Allen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:09:00 GMT

When I first started reading David Armano's blog posts about the "Fuzzy Tail" and the blurring of boundaries between roles in our industry, I knew we had to have him at MIX.

He gave a session entitled "Why Fuzzy is the New Clear" at our first MIX UX track. We interviewed him to find out about his session. Watch all the way to the end to find out details about his new book :-)

Get the Software Tools Featured at MIX08

Joshua Allen — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Attendees at MIX08 were provided with copies of developer tools and a fast download location to grab newest copies of the software. Now most of these tools are available for free download!

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.

The Back of the Napkin with Dan Roam

Joshua Allen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:53:00 GMT

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

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 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.

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.

Weather Beyond the Browser with WeatherBug

Joshua Allen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:37:00 GMT

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.

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!

Elvis Learns Silverlight

Joshua Allen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:44:00 GMT

Elvis had so much fun last year at MIX07, he registered early this year and reserved his spot. Proudly showing his "The King" attendee badge and waiting anxiously to be the first to get into sessions, he would blend right in if not for his flamboyant clothes and signature hairdo.

Yesterday, we followed Elvis around as he interviewed the other attendees and had a blast enjoying all of the recreation provided on-site at the conference. Stay tuned for more perspective from "The King" from day 2.

Join us for Show Off at Lando 4201 at 6:00 PM on Thursday, March 6th

Denise Begley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:01:00 GMT

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.

Aston Martin at MIX08

Joshua Allen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

Aston Martin make some of the hottest cars in the world, and they showed off a really hot application during the MIX keynote. Nishant sat down with Marek Reichman from Aston Martin and Paul Bishop of Splendid, to get a demo and have an in-depth conversation about their design process. These guys have intensely demanding standards for design, and it's a fascinating insight into the process behind one of the most prestigious brands in the world. Check it out!

Mobile Social Networking with Silverlight 2

Joshua Allen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:01:00 GMT

I sat down with Darren and Nathan of Stimulant, to find out more about the mobile-based Silverlight app they showed in the keynote. These are the guys that did the Northface kiosk, as well as the largest gesture-based interface ever. They demo the app here in-depth, including the first gesture-based navigation on a Windows Mobile device.

NBC Olympics Player

Joshua Allen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:49:00 GMT

Some time ago, we announced that NBC would be using Silverlight to broadcast the Olympics to the web. Now, for the first time, NBC is showing what the application looks like -- and it is beautiful! Nishant interviewed Perkins Miller of NBC about the application, and got an exclusive demo -- this is all working code as shown in the keynote.

Watch Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki Keynote

Joshua Allen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:48:00 GMT

Update: You can download or stream the keynote on-demand here.

The Steve Ballmer Q&A with Guy Kawasaki starts at 1:00PM PST. You can watch the keynote here, or load one of the following URLs in Windows Media Player or VLC.

Don't forget to follow along with the crowd reaction and add your own by following mix08 on Twitter!

Repeat Sessions added to MIX08 for Thursday, March 6th

Denise Begley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:46:55 GMT

We've heard your feedback and have agreement from MIX08 speakers to present repeat sessions on the most popular sessions from Wednesday and Thursday.

Repeat sessions for 5:45 to 7:00 PM Thursday, March 6th as follows:

RTC01–Building Rich Internet Applications Using Microsoft Silverlight 2 (Delfino 4003)
RBT05–Introducing SQL Server Data Services (Delfino 4005)
RT20–Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls (Delfino 4105)
RBCT07–Encoding Video for Microsoft Silverlight Delivery Scenarios (Delfino 4001A)
RCT04–Crossing the Usability Chasm – Advanced and Adaptive User Interfaces (Delfino 4101A)

Stay tuned for 3 additional repeats which will run on Friday at 11:45am.
We will announce these sessions Friday morning. Check http://visitmix.com and CommNet for details!