Coming back from Mix10
Well Mix10 is wrapping up and I’m beat. I think my brain needs some time to process everything I’ve seen and learned but some interesting nuggets are floating around in there already. If anyone out there is still wondering if attending Mix is worth it, stop wondering. The sessions aren’t the real reason people attend a conference like this, they’re merely the excuse. The real reason to attend Mix is for the conversations. You are constantly having great dialogues with the presenters, with your peers, or with Miguel de Icaza, Erik Meijer, or Bill Buxton. It’s these conversations that are the true value of Mix, the sessions you can see for free online within 48 hours from the time they occurred.
Windows 7 phone
The biggest story at this year’s Mix is the “unveiling” of the Windows 7 phone. Overall I have to say that I wasn’t extremely impressed and I think it’s likely to flop. Unless Microsoft’s marketing department can pull some magic out of their collective hats the phone is going to run into the classic chicken and egg problem between applications and users. I have some arguments to back up that statement but they’ll require a post of their own.
IE 9
IE 9 looks like a step in the right direction. The demos were impressive but you’d have to be a fool to do a major demo where you didn’t beat the pants off your competition, especially when you’re running with most of the chrome and user features turned off. I’m sure the Chrome, Firefox, and Opera teams could all put together similarly impressive demos showing how their browsers leave IE 9 in the dust. Historically Internet Explorer has never had a place on my computers and I haven’t seen anything from IE 9 that is likely to change that position.
OData
I don’t really have anything to say about OData. It looks like a cool solution to a problem I’ve never had. I will most likely consume an OData service at some point and I’ll definitely look into it some more then. I was happy to see LINQ integration since that was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the first demo. That got a clap from me me and like one other person during the keynote which leaves me curious if everyone else just expected it or if they haven’t realized the amount of power LINQ puts at your fingertips. I’m betting it’s the former.
Silverlight
The big winner at this Mix was Silverlight. With Silverlight 4 it’s becoming a very real solution for the internet connected applications of the future. I honestly believe Silverlight or something like it is the future of internet applications. I can run an application on the web, from my desktop, from my laptop, from my phone, or from anywhere else and always have the same data and settings shared to whatever device I’m on. That’s a really powerful story from a user’s perspective. From the developer’s perspective using MVVM I can run the exact same model and viewmodel for every device and create multiple views so I can choose the best for whatever screen the user wants to see. That takes away quite a few pain points and represents a pretty big cost reduction to management.
