Mix 2010 Day 2 Recap

Day 2 of this year’s Mix conference is coming to an end. Time to compile a summary of what has been going on.

First, the first session videos and slides are coming online right now. Download them from https://live.visitmix.com/videos

Then, I found a tool built by Sobees that aggregates everything that is going on here: https://mix10.sobees.com. Amazing. That made me give my vote for #MixRockstar to @sobees. (https://mixrockstar.cloudapp.net/) MixRockstar – you may have guessed – is a social networking popularity contest played in Twitter. Hot stuff.

And now to all of the announcements from today.

Microsoft Web Platform

Visual Studio 2010 is around the corner. And I have demoed it many times, still, there are some things that I hadn’t tried before. For example multi-monitor support. simply detach any tab and drag it onto a second screen. Boom! (as Steve Jobs would say).

One-Click-Web-Publishing as been polished again for the release candidate. I did a demo back at TechDays 2009, but the technology now is very mature, including the ability to copy databases or specific data to staging- or deployment servers.

Microsoft <3 jQuery. A big and bold statement, but we are really in with both feet. (Including the cool Converse in the picture – very much my style :) )

jQuery is supported and shipped with the tools and the framework, has perfect intellisense support and using the new jQuery templates, doing previously complex tasks in ASP.NET become a snap. Microsoft will actively contribute source code to jQuery and supply testing tools.

John Resig, the founder of jQuery on stage confirmed and returned the love. This is good news.

BizSpark and WebsiteSpark

The two programs for startups and students to get free Microsoft software for production use over 3 years has received quite some limelight.

My personal favorite was the quick demo of Curse a great site for resources for MMORPG gamers that I use a lot as an old WoW junkie. Curse switched to ASP.NET thanks to the program.

Internet Explorer 9

First, Internet Explorer 6 is dead. There even were pictures from the funeral...

The first statement about Internet Explorer 9 was “Do HTML5 right”. And the demos proved that we are on the right way. On the side of performance, Internet Explorer 9 does feature a new, hot (read: fast) JavaScript engine dubbed Jakra. But the great idea is to boost performance in rendering by leveraging the PC’s hardware. This is especially beneficial in complex AJAX, SVG and HTML5 solutions.

A netbook was shown that rendered 2 true-hd videos using HTML5’s video object simultaneously with no frame loss at 25% of the CPU’s capacity.

In every other browser, this resulted in massive stutter at100% CPU.

The developer tools in Internet Explorer 9 have been revamped as well and now include real-time SVG manipulation in the debugger as well as a new Network section that allows to monitor network traffic and performance.

In ACID3 tests, the current preview of Internet Explorer 9 doesn’t yet hit 100, but “we are getting there”.

The developer preview can be downloaded from https://ietestdrive.com and doesn’t require Internet Explorer 8 (which I hope you are using) to be uninstalled.

Updates to the developer preview can be expected roughly every 8 weeks, so we can keep up with the current development.

oData and the Cloud

By far the most astonishing announcement for me today was around open standards: the announcement of the “Open Data Protocol” (oData). In brief, it is what RSS does for news feeds, only it delivers strongly typed data. The REST interface allows for powerful, URL based querying. Netflix has announced the availability of their catalog data in oData, if you want to have a look at it, navigate to https://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/. If for example you want to see the metadata, just add $metadata to the URL: https://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/$metadata.

Of course, integration oData into your Visual Studio projects is a snap, just add a reference and use the new “oData Visualizer Extension for Visual Studio”, downloadable today, to visually dill into the data available from the service. Then query the data using LINQ and bind them to any control of your liking.

We will also provide an oData SDK for iPhone developers, SharePoint support for oData and PowerPivot for Excel, that allows to integrate oData in Excel.

Hosting oData services in Azure is a snap, SQL Azure will allow their creation from any database hosted in the cloud.

Microsoft codename “Dallas” will be the marketplace for these services and will become THE oData catalog.

That’s it for day 2 of Mix 2010!