Mix 09' Was Amazing!
Mix 09' was amazing! There were so many great announcements and a wide variety of very interesting presentations. The two keynotes were exciting as well, and I particularly enjoyed the keynote on day 2 where Deborah Adler talked in depth about how she designed a comprehensive system for packaging prescription medicine for her master's thesis. Target saw great potential in Deborah's ideas and collaborated with her to develop the ClearRx system for prescription medicines; a system that is both beautiful and saves lives. Amazing stuff and very inspiring!
I want to quickly call attention to some of the presentations that I found particularly interesting...
- Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3 In this presentation, Brad shows how Silverlight 3 now makes it fast and easy to develop line of business applications. This is great stuff!
- .NET RIA Services - Building Data-Driven Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft ASP.NET In this presentation, Nikhil shows how Silverlight and ASP.Net can be used together to greatly simplify the n-tier application pattern. I would also recommend that you check out Nikhil's Silverlight framework for building RIA applications! There are some great patterns in the framework that greatly simplify application development
- Working across the Client Continuum In this presentation, Laurent shows how you can use the same WCF service for a variety of client applications including HTML, AJAX, ASP.Net, Silverlight, and WPF. He spells things out very clearly, and this presentation is a great learning tool!
- Sketch Flow: From Concept to Production This is one of my favorite presentations! Christian does a terrific job of showing off many of the great new capabilities provided by Sketch Flow (a designers best friend). Be sure to check it out!
- The Future of Microsoft Expression Blend In this presentation, Christian and Doug talk about the power Blend gives designers to control their creative vision in a productive and collaborative manner. This is a must see for designers!
- Web Form Design This presentation describes the benefits of utilizing Ux patterns to improve the user experience of web forms. Very informative and detailed; well worth watching
- User Experience Design for Non-Designers This is an interesting presentation that quickly describes the process of good user experience design. I really enjoyed it!
- User Experience Design Patterns for Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3 In this presentation, I talk about core design principles, design patterns, and design attributes that can be used to create great business application user experiences. I also touch on how easy it is to implement several key business application design patterns in Silverlight 3 (I wish I had more time to drill into the details here)
The application I built during my Mix presentation is available here, and requires...
I made a couple of minor tweaks to the application to improve the user experience from what I presented at Mix (e.g. the 'In Progress' page previously showed double sets of 'Save' and 'Cancel' buttons; I eliminated this problem), and, please note that there are a couple of bugs that may appear in the UI as you interact with it, and these are known issues (e.g. paging may not work consistently and deleting items from the main DataForm on the 'In Progress' page will throw an error if you delete any item that sits right above a group header).
Also, the two application styles I show at the beginning of my presentation are available here, and look as follows when applied to your application when created using the new Silverlight 3 Navigation template...
Frosted Cinnamon Toast
Lime Shocker
You can easily swap in one of my App.xaml files for the App.xaml file produced when you use the Silverlight 3 Navigation template, but you may need to upate the namespace reference; for example, if I use the template to create an application called 'SLApp', the App.xaml file will show the following for the x:class 'x:Class="SLApp1.App"'. My App.xaml file might use the following namespace, so you will need to update it to match yours, x:Class="UIOne.App".
I can't wait for Mix 10'! I hope you'll be there, but in the mean time be sure to check out the great Mix 09' content!