News from Mix 2009 – Day 3

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And now for something completely different. Out of curiosity on the subject and because I wanted to see Chris Sells and Douglas Purdy live, I attended their session on

“Developing RESTful services and client using “M” (Oslo).

A very intense talk on “M”, a language for specifying data.

Their demos in “Intellipad” were very impressive. You basically load a custom DSL into the tool and then use the editor interface to execute commands against this DSL. In “3 pane mode” you can use one of the 4 panes :P to see the DSL source and edit it real-time. The editor picks up on that instantly and reflects this in its validation of contents of the command window.

They used the MUrl DSL, to post to the Twitter API from command line.

Their work can be downloaded from https://msdn.microsoft.com/oslo.

Virtual Earth Silverlight Control

This is the one, most powerful tool I have ever seen for mapping. The Siverlight Virtual Earth Control can be downloaded for testing at https://connect.microsoft.com/VirtualEarthMapControlCTP. Install the MSI that gives you the libraries (Microsoft.VirtualEarth.MapControl.dll), you need to reference from your Silverlight 2 project and try the interactive SDK to learn how to use the various functions provided by the SDK.

The managed library does not just allow to display and fully control the Silverlight map control as well as add ANY XAML on top of it (polygons, images, videos) that either scale with the map (to mark regions) or keep their size (to display pushpins). It also allows access to the MapPoint Web Services, allowing for more complex actions like calculating routes or searching POIs (Casinos in Las Vegas for example) – the returned data can then be used from your application.

Microsoft Surface

A session I attended mostly around designing NUI (Natural User Interface) applications, an interesting bit was that the speaker talked about a soon-to-be publicly available version of the Surface SDK for desktop PCs including an emulator to test Surface applications even without multi-touch hardware. I haven’t found a URL yet but it may be worth keeping an eye on this.

Unfortunately, there is no date set for Surface availability in Switzerland.

Final words.

I like the format of using one slot per session to deliver 2 or 3 mini-presentations instead of a regular, 75 minute break-out, giving a level 50 very-quick intro into various topics.

That’s all for now! Learn more about many of the topics covered at Mix09 at TechDays in April in Geneva and Berne and get the session recordings from https://live.mix.com.