Back From MIX and Fired Up
So MIX06 may be old news, but it is still fresh in my mind. I took a week off after the show but now I'm back and fired up! The show itself was great (and not just because it was in Las Vegas). I can finally talk about what I've been up to for the last month and why my blog has been relatively quiet. During February and March, I worked on four different projects with external companies to show WPF prototypes by partners, three of which had never been seen before. Other than the North Face project, I couldn't talk about any of them until now. So, over the next few days, I'll be posting some recaps of these prototypes. In brief, here are the companies I worked with and the prototypes shown.
1. Yahoo. There was a prototype of My Yahoo shown as a WPF XBAP in both Dean Hachamovitch's keynote and Michael Wallent's session. Unforunately, the demo isn't until the very end of the two hour webcast clip and there is no way to fast forward unless you download the whole thing, which is what I would recommend if you want to see it. (Also, once Michael Wallent's session is posted to the MIX site, I'd recommend watching that session too, for a longer run through of the My Yahoo demo as well as a bunch of other great WPF demos.) And I would recommend you see it! Some very cool UI metaphors and usage of WPF is shown for solving issues around portal usage.
There was also a prototype of Yahoo Finance in Joe Belfiore's keynote that had some great WPF 3D work for visualizing portfolio data. For some reason, Joe's keynote isn't posted to Virtual MIX06 yet, but as soon as it is, I'll note it, so you can see this one in action.
2. Car & Driver/AMG Mercedes/AvenueA-Razorfish. This demo, done by AvenueA-Razorfish, showed off both the reading experience that WPF can provide as well as a next generation online advertisement of an AMG-Mercedes. The AMG-Mercedes app shows a very nice blend of video, bitmap assets, 2D animation and 3D to create an advertising experiences that blends TV and interactivity. You can check out an interview with AvenueA-Razorfish here that also shows a demo of the AMG Mercedes application. Also, keep an eye on Jered's blog: he worked on the project and always has something interesting to say!
3. Nascar/REZN8. Andrew Whiddett has been featured on my blog before when he posted some asynchronous databinding code. That was just a taste of what he and the folks at REZN8 had been working on, which had its début at MIX. They have been working with a company called Electric Red, which brands media products under major sports brands from 2 inch devices to Media Center. The demo they showed was the NASCAR and was a beautiful interactive 3D experience with a very sophisticated framework for doing layout and interactivity. It also uses WCF to do asynchronous databinding in a very impressive way. You can watch the video here. Hopefully, I'll coax Andrew into posting some more samples on my blog.
4. The North Face/ Fluid. Darren David gave a great talk at MIX about the latest version of The North Face prototype, first seen at PDC and which you can see in this Channel 9 video. He basically walked through this white paper posted on MSDN. There is also an interview with Andrew Sirotnik, CEO of Fluid, from MIX, although there isn't a walkthough of the demo.
Over the next few days, I'll drill a bit more into each of these prototypes as far as lessons learned, best practices, etc.