MIX UK: the talks, the interviews and the swag!
by Kevin Pfister
For those that were wondering, MIX UK is a premier web designer and developer event to find out about new technologies and software solutions and how to use them to create rich media experiences.
Apart from the amazing talks, MIX provided a great opportunity to connect and interact with other people that share a passion for creativity and innovation. Being a Microsoft Student Partner this particularly provided an insight into the inner working of the industry and getting to meet some current Microsoft developers was nice to see what my hopefully future job will be... *hint*
After the entertainment of various train journeys, delays and trying to find the building I arrived at MIX UK. Quickly running into the keynote I started my two days of stunned awe as I started to find out about some of the great new technologies that Microsoft and some of its partners are currently developing.
Once the keynote had finished I met up with Dr Andrew Sithers; head of the UK academic team and also Dominic Green, a MSP. Dominic and I then went forth to do our main task of the event; video it for Channel 8. Wait a minute you say; Channel 8? Well it’s a new video website from Microsoft that follows along the lines of Channel 10 and 9, but is specially catered for students.
We started off by taking the Development side of the event by finding out about Silverlight; a new web based technology allowing designers and developers to create rich online media experiences. Presented by Scott Guthrie, he talked about how to create an application and showed off some of the cool features of Silverlight.
If you are like me and interested in developing for Silverlight then now is a great time as Microsoft are providing hosting for Silverlight projects and Media on their Silverlight Streaming service... for FREE... let me just repeat that... for FREE!
At the event we met up with Paul Kiddie, some MSP’s may know about him as he himself was an MSP from last year, and I know him from the Student Technology Conference in Germany from when I was a Microsoft Student Representative.
After lunch and some interviews we continued the developer strand with a look into Windows Live Services and what’s on offer from dev.live.com check it out, it’s a great place to start learning. They have just released some more starter kits in which you can alter and see how everything is made, a great start if you’re just coming into web programming.
At the end of the first day there was a panel discussion about the issue of ‘Cloud vs Client’, should we use online services or client based, what are the problems with online services and can there be a hybrid of the two. Danny Thorpe who used to work on Google Gears provided most of the technical answers and some interesting insights into the problems with offline – online communications.
After some interesting experiences in the evening such as a very serious Guitar Hero faceoff, a cooker randomly being situated in the hotel room and the tube line we wanted being closed we got ready for day 2 of MIX.
And so Day 2 of MIX UK began with a mix between development and designing. As most students will know Microsoft has catered for the development sector for a long time with Visual Studio however little was done for the design community which was a shame, that was until they launched Expression Studio; a suite of products aimed at designers so they can closely work together with developers using Visual Studio in such a way that their ideas can go straight into the final design.
Now if anyone has read my blog, which I hope, you all have. I really love Windows Mobile, and so I went to the talk ‘Designing interactions for Mobile Computing’, it was great to see how Mobile devices such as Ultra Mobile PC’s are starting to gain momentum and how developers and designers alike are now having to rethink their applications to take into account these new technologies.
Then came the big moment, our exclusive interview with Scott Guthrie, he is a General Manager of several development teams at Microsoft’s Developer division. He is in charge of things like .NET Compact Framework, CLR, ASP.Net, WPF, Silverlight etc. so lots of things then. He is a great guy and if you want to look at the interview it should be on Channel 8 in a week or so, so bookmark it now and check it out often!
Another person we were able to grab for an interview was Angus Logan who works on Windows Live and had a lot to say about the new features and the just released sample sites; another great interview that will be coming to a Channel 8 near you. There are lots of other interviews that I haven’t got space to talk about here but will be on Channel 8 and I shall talk more on my blog, so check them out.
The second day’s afternoon was filled with IronPython; a .Net language created using the Dynamic Language Runtime and also Swaggily Fortunes... I think you can guess that by the end of that I had a lot of swag.
The best was left till last as it was time for the sneak peeks. I won’t say much here as you will just have to wait and see but I will just say that the future of computing... and that of Halo 3, looks pretty amazing and I cannot wait to be a part of it.
So if you would like to learn more about MIX UK and see the videos of the talks which will be posted online shortly visit the MIX UK homepage at https://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/
However if you want to find out more about my experiences at MIX and just my general ramblings read my blog at https://blogplusequals.blogspot.com/
Now of course I guess everyone wants to see how we got on and our interviews so there is only one place for that; Channel 8. So here is the link that I expect you all to bookmark shortly. https://channel8.msdn.com/