MIX11: Bringing the Developer Awesomeness

MIX11

Spring is here and what a better way to kick off this season of renewal by getting up-to-speed on some of the latest tools and technologies! Last month in Las Vegas, we hosted the MIX11 conference; a 72-hour conversation, featuring developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web. At this event, we made a number of key announcements and I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight them.

Get Your MIX FixBy the way, if you weren’t able to attend MIX11, DO NOT WORRY. All of the sessions were recorded and are now available for you to watch online. Simply visit https://live.visitmix.com/, grab a coffee and enjoy the awesomeness from MIX11 in beautiful HD via Silverlight Streaming!

Alternatively, if you are the type of person who likes to have media assets closer to home, you can follow the steps outlined by Scott Hanselman to download all of the videos from MIX11 via RSS. Go check out his blog post entitled, Mix 11 Videos - Download them all with RSS to find out how to do this.

Just a Few Canadian Highlights at MIX11

As you know, there was a large group of Canadians who went down to Las Vegas for MIX11. Here’s are a few of the highlighted captured by that group:

Now, onto what we announced!

Windows Internet Explorer - Small

As you know, Internet Explorer 9 shipped in March, which – if you haven’t already done so – you can download from beautyoftheweb.ca. Building on that momentum at MIX11, we announced the public availability of IE10 Platform Preview 1. The purpose of this release is to give developers a head’s up on the next wave of progress we’re making in HTML5. IE10 PP1 provides some awesome new capabilities like CSS3 Flexbox layout, grid alignment, multi-column layout and gradients. (Don’t forget to check out the recent blog post I’ve written about CSS3 gradients in IE10.) Also, IE10 PP1 adds support for ECMAScript strict mode! w00t! You can download IE10 PP1 and check out our latest demos featuring these capabilities by visiting ietestdrive.com.

If you’re in Ottawa or Edmonton this month, don’t forget to register and attend the IE9 / WP7 Boot Camp! This is a great way to get up-to-date on these two great products!

ASP.NET

Another big highlight at MIX11 was the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update, which you can install via Web PI or download by going to the download details page. The Tools Update adds a lot of awesomeness to Visual Studio and NuGet, in order to help web developers targeting ASP.NET MVC and NuGet for package management. Note: You can check out the release notes as well for more details. For a higher-level description of what this release might mean to web developers, I encourage you read Phil Haack’s blog post entitled, Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update. Also check out the latest statistics on NuGet by visiting https://stats.nuget.org/. Lots of open source goodness going on!

Of course, this cannot be understated:

Of course, we kid because we love Phil Haack.

Microsoft Silverlight - Small

Of course, it wouldn’t be MIX without Silverlight. At MIX11, we announced the public availability of Silverlight 5 Beta, which includes some of the following new features:

  • XAML Debugging with breakpoints for binding debugging
  • Implicit data templates for easy UI reuse
  • Double (and multi) click support
  • GPU-accelerated XNA-compatible 3D and immediate-mode 2D API
  • Low-latency sound effects and WAV support
  • Real operating system windows and multi-display support
  • Significant performance improvements, fixes and much more

There’s a ton of goodness in Silverlight 5 Beta and rather than trying to articulate everything that’s in the Beta release, I’ll simply encourage you to go check out Pete Brown’s blog post entitled, Announcing the Silverlight 5 Beta Release and the Silverlight.net Redesign. Tim Heuer also has an excellent blog post on the Silverlight 5 Beta feature-set entitled, Silverlight 5 Beta–A guide to the new features. Both posts provide a great overview of the Silverlight 5 Beta and I’d recommend you take a moment to check them out!

Windows Phone - Blue - Small

Finally, we announced some great new tools and enhancements for Windows Phone. However, just like the Silverlight 5 Beta, I don’t have enough room here to share with you all of the “what’s new”. The good news is that fellow Canadian and Windows Phone expert, Mark Artegea and gone ahead and summarized everything you need to know in a guest blog post he’s written for the Canadian Developer Connection. Check out his post entitled, MIX11 and Windows Phone Re-Cap for all the news and highlights we announced at MIX11 around Windows Phone.

Whew! That’s a lot of great stuff! I would recommend that you take a few minutes away from watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs (Go Canucks!) and check out these great tools and technologies!