Getting Ready for MIX06!

Hi, I’m Cyra Richardson, relatively new Lead Program Manager on the IE team. As the new person, I was handed the opportunity to coordinate the content for the IE team’s participation at MIX06. It’s Friday, Tony is running on next to no sleep, Peter is running around trying to make sure the latest IE bits are on the Sandbox Machines, Markus is practicing his demos and Al was bugging me to write a blog entry. The pace before every show is frenetic; MIX06 is no different.

Cats in the Sandbox

The MIX06 event team came up with the idea of having a lab called The Sandbox, within which attendees could play with the latest technologies being shown and MIX06. There will be two IE sections to The Sandbox; the RSS area and the IE7 Compatibility area.

The RSS lab - Members of the RSS team, also known as guides, will hand out a manual with sample code that will walk developers through the process of writing their own screen saver that obtains its list of images from a live RSS feed!

The IE7 Compatibility lab - Members of the Internet Explorer team will guide web developers of all types through a process that will help them identify the compatibility issues with their sites. Folks that come in on Sunday will get a little surprise when they start up Internet Explorer on the machines in this lab. :)

Monday: Hitting the ground running

Because I have been coordinating the content for the Internet Explorer Team’s participation at MIX06, I have had the opportunity to see talks early in their development. And I would like to share with you some of the inside track on cool talks.

For those that stayed out late on Sunday night, it would behoove you to drag yourself out of bed on bright and early Monday morning. Bill Gates, Tim O’Reilly (founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media) and Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager of the Internet Explorer Team) will lead a survey of technologies that can help make your business more productive. Later on Monday, Dean Hachamovitch will lead a discussion with industry experts exploring the Future of IE.

Tuesday: In the middle of things

With the inspiration of the first days talks in mind, Tuesday should be a good day for figuring out how to use some the technologies surveyed on the first day. Our collective customers have increasing concerns about the safety of shopping on the internet. Rob Franco will talk about the new features that help customers feel safer using the internet in IE7, and how to work with them in building your sites, in his talk, "Making Your Site Work with IE7 Security."

Wednesday: The best for last

De Jure or Du Jour?

Some of the folks that saw the title of Chris Wilson’s talk, "Open, De Jure, De Facto and Proprietary: Standards and Microsoft," and assumed that De Jure was a misspelling for Du Jour – and actually, it was filed wrong on the MIX06 web site for a while – but they were incorrect. Check out Chris’ talk to learn more French (well, okay, not really) and to gain insight into how Microsoft thinks about standards.

Really Simple Syndication

Previously, the RSS platform has been used as a mechanism for pushing (or pulling depending on your perspective) text between the producer and the consumers. In Walter VonKoch’s talk, the concept of using RSS as in innovative ways to create live web applications will be explored.

Beauty is in the eye of the customer

Markus Mielke has been the Microsoft representative in the W3C working group for over a year now. In his talk, he will explain how Microsoft is using the feedback from our customers to improve the standards compliance in IE7.

Hope to see you there!

 - Cyra Richardson

Update: Fixed a few typos.