ReMIX07
Why it’s time to rethink & ReMix
On the frontiers of the Web, the boundaries are blurring: between developers and designers; between advertisers and publishers; between software and services; between media and technology; between TVs and PCs; between producers and consumers. The old order is getting a little mixed up.
ReMix is Microsoft’s conference for cutting-edge web professionals designing and building next-generation experiences through Silverlight.
With capabilities never experienced before, Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web while bridging communication gap between designers and developers.
(from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix07/about.aspx)
Held at Crown Palladium Promanade, ReMIX07:AU was an interesting event, Will and I tagged along to various things together.
Day 1
-
“Registration and refreshments”
8:00 am – 9:00 amWow. Early morning. Sucked. Will and I went to the wrong place thanks to me, but we got there eventually.
There was food, I think, but nothing that stood out too much -
Keynote Address
9:00 am – 10:30 amFinula Crowe – product manager for Microsoft Australia, and a lovely lady in general (we spoke to her at WebJam) – opened the keynote, then handed over to Brian Goldfarb – Group Product Manager in Redmond (I think?).
It was amusing to see that despite Finula having a very thick Irish accent, the crowd responded to her as if she was ‘one of us’, but as soon as the American Brian stepped on, people tuned out a little.Brian talked about how Microsoft provide a platform rather than just a product. That is, .NET.
Then on to how the platform has to change to keep up with users changes. No longer is all your ‘computing’ done on a computer, but its also done on an Xbox360 (through XNA), on a mobile phone (.NET Mobile Edition), and through the web browser (ASP.NET and now, Silverlight).
Overall, I found Brian to be a bit boring – Will agreed, but probably because it was the exact same speech/slides as what he presented at MIX. Maybe its how American’s generally talk slower than us aussies, but he just seemed to be slow moving throughout his presentation.Shane Morris who followed with demo’s of the Expression products quickly.
Lucas Sherwood from Lightmaker followed showing off some of Lightmakers endevours with Silverlight (and I think WPF). This was probably the most interesting part of the keynote for me. It was fantastic to see what is actually achievable with Silverlight/WPF, rather than “oh, its so awesome, you can do so much, let me show you my hello world/flickr carosel”.
I’m fairly certain somebody from @WWW presented something, I just can’t remember who/what. I think it was the National Geographic video website powered by Silverlight which had a guy drinking from elephant dung.
-
Lee Brimlow
Rapid Fire Design & Prototyping in WPF
10:45 am – 11:45 amLee showed off his adventures in WPF, starting with his very first attempts just by using Expression Blend as if it was Flash. This included some three dimensional stuff, animation, video, the ‘must have’ Flickr example, etc.
Then he moved onto the examples where he played with XAML/proper classes, some physics, speech API, lists.Overall, while his presentation was done well, it was a bit boring and slow moving. It would have been nice if he had of showed how he achieved some of the cooler things in Blend (Yahoo WPF client anybody?).
For me, there was nothing new in this presentation – I’ve played with WPF, both with XAML and through Expression Blend..The complaints about ‘AllowTransparency’ that Lee had, I’ve already blogged about.
I was a bit disappointed and disheartened by this first presentation, as it wasn’t what I was expecting from Lee (since I read his WPF Blog). I don’t really think it was Lee’s fault so much as I think the hour long sessions weren’t enough to properly cover the content. An hour and a half to two hours would have made most of the sessions ‘better’. -
Morning Tea
11:45 am – 12:00 pmI can’t really remember much about what food was there, apart from Morning Tea on Day Two. That is to say, most of it was fairly ‘blah’, and in small quantites.
For essentially a geek conference (thanks Blaman…), the food was lacking. -
Laurence Moroney
Rich Web Applications with Silverlight, XAML and Javascript
12:00 pm – 1:00 pmUnlike the first session I attended, this was a more ‘developer’-centric presentation.
Unfortunately (for me), Laurence covered Silverlight 1.0, not 1.1 (which is the cool .NET version, rather than Javascript. This is the reason there isn’t many notes, plus, anybody reading things blog as probably already figured out what Silverlight is from MIX).
In a nutshell, Silverlight is cool because its ‘object oreintated’-ish; it handles enough media – WMV7/8/9, VC1 (think HD), WMA and MP3; said media is handled very nicely behind the scenes with buffering/downloading as well as bandwidth optimisation (so it won’t buffer too much unless the user really needs it) and most values are normalised for working with them nicely. -
Lunch
1:00 pm – 2:00 pmThe food served was the same served both days, and the same served at the Cisco Technology Day which was in Crown Palladium. Sadly, it was much better at the free Cisco Tech Day – more food (~4 tables rather than two), and the nachos were warmer and less soggy.
-
Lucas Sherwood
Switching to WPF and Silverlight
2:00 pm- 3:00 pmContinuing on from his quick demo in the keynote, Lucas showed off two applications – one WPF, one Silverlight – and talked about his company’s (Lightmaker) experience – that is, being thrown in the deepend on several fronts.
The programs he showed were really nice ‘looking’, unfortunately the WPF one (The Olympic Social Network) failed to get past the login screen.
The Silverlight application Lightmaker developed for Orlando Magic was really neat looking. So neat that I’ve started playing with Silverlight 1.1 myself, and a demo of that should be up within the next couple of weeks (I’ve got a dozen blog posts to get through first…)Lucas stated a few times how he’s a developer not a presenter, and yes, he occasionally did exactly what I do when I present is shuffle back and forward and talk fast, but I have to admit, he had one of the best presentations (minus the grand exceptions) of the conference.
-
Steve Marx
Vista Sidebar Gadgets
3:15 pm- 4:15 pmThis was in the smallest room, so the presentation had a much ‘closer/personal’ feel to it.
Surprisingly, Steve was the first to use Internet Explorer. Not the only one, but the majority of presenters used Firefox, which was interesting.
I’ve looked at Sidebar gadgets a little, so there wasn’t anything hugely surprising for me.
Sidebar gadgets are HTML/Javascript. They have certain restrictions on them – sizewise as well as capabilities. They’re really insecure (no way to encrypt sensitive data). They can host Silverlight data, as well as making AJAX calls.Its good to see that there are some ‘forward thinking’ parts to Sidebar gagdets. For example, in the Gadget.XML, <permissions> tag current does nothing (its set to ‘full‘), but they are hoping to add more security into it later, as well as potentially expanding it (speculation, but maybe an iGoogle-esque webportal where you can drag gadgets from your sidebar to your portal – and visaversa).
-
Afternoon Tea
4:15 pm – 4:30 pm -
Phil Beadle and Dave Glover
Orcas for Web Developers
4:30 pm – 5:30 pmPhil and Dave had an interesting session on some of the new web developer based tools available in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas), particularly looking at XHTML/CSS tools, as well as Javascript Intellisense/etc. These features made Expression Web seem a bit pointless – look down to the Expression Web session coverage to see what I mean.
Overall, good presentation, those two looked like they had a lot of fun.
-
WebJam & Galactic Circus festivities
5:30 pm – 10:00 pmI thought WebJam was crap to be honest. I wasn’t in the actual tiny room they were presenting in, so all I had was 3x massive TV’s and horrendous audio feeds to go by.
Apparently they had no net connection there, and since its WebJam, that kind of messed things up a little.
Sat down and mostly talked to other ReMIX attendee’s, which was good…the people of ReMIX (attendees, presenters, and general staff) really made the experience great. Nothing like seeing Frank run like crazy ;)
Day 2
Unfortunately, I was so wrecked after day one (I didn’t get home till 11pm or so!), I didn’t bother bringing mums laptop with me on day two, so I didn’t write that many notes/can’t remember too much of it.
Day two, however, saw me bring along my Foam Blue Monster.
Nick Hodge snapped that photo while Will and I were playing Gears of War on the Xbox 360′s setup. Just for the record, I won most of the games ;)
I’ll get some better photos of the Blue Monster when I get home.
-
Keynote
I rocked up half an hour late because I slept in till 7am. 10 minutes before my train was supposed to leave.
The crowd seemed mostly asleep when I arrived anyway. -
Joseph Cooney
WPF Fundamentals: Developing Rich Interactive Applications -
Michael Kordahi
Designing with Microsoft Expression Web: Today and Tomorrow.I attended this mostly because the other two sessions running at the same time didn’t really appeal to me, and that we were to receive a free copy of Expression Web (xWeb)For what its worth, Michael did a fantastic job of promoting and trying to sell the product. The truth is though, I don’t think anybody was impressed enough to want to go out and buy this, or switch from whatever they were previously using.It would be fair to say this is a direct competitor to Adobe’s Dreamweaver and while its a huge step up from Frontpage, xWeb still seems to be a long way behind.
A few of the very bad points are:
- xWeb doesn’t support any other server side languages other than ASP.NET in v1 (v2 is meant to add PHP).
- xWeb doesn’t have Intellisense for ASP.NET (C#/VB.NET etc), so you’re extremely unlikely to want to do any ‘backend’ code in it.
- Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) has most of its big selling features like HTML/Javascript Syntax highlighting/Intellisense. And if you remember Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) Expression Web Edition (try saying that a few times…) is free, and xWeb is “worth” $550AUD…well..
- The Expression range is trying to be both for designers and developers. If thats the case, why does xWeb have the worst interface out of the suite? All of the other Expression products have a unified black ‘I’m-dark-and-sexy-therefore-I’m-a-designer-tool’ appearance to them, but xWeb is stuck in Office 2003 mode.
- Doesn’t support any versioning/source control
- Won’t open VSProj files like Expression Blend does
It did have some good points, like being able to drag-and-drop CSS, as well as the decent WYSIWYG code generation, but nothing that was a really big selling point for somebody who can figure out XHTML/CSS, which aren’t exactly the hardest things to learn.
xWeb WYSIWYG editor won’t make it easier to create fantastic/unusual XHTML/CSS appearances, nor does its code view have anything that things like Notepad++ doesn’t have.
If anything, if you’re a WYSIWYG person, its fantastic. It generates standards compliant code. Thats about it though.The other thing to note was Michael is a funny guy, and had a fantastic presentation (Standards compliant code gets the chickz!). Its just a pity his subject sucked so very much.
-
Panel: Web 2.0
On the panel was Cameron Reilly of Podcast Network, Ben Barren from Gnoos, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb, and Michael Kordahi with Brad Howarth of lagrange communications moderating.
I didn’t write notes for this panel – for the audience it was intended for most of the information and discussion would have already been done to death. “Web2.0 is not just a technology, its an idea”, “Australia lags behind”, “Corporations lag behind”, etc.Cameron Reilly was very distracting – he was very overconfident to the point where he seemed arrogant. I won’t call him arrogant as thats unfair, I haven’t met him or talked with him personally, but when he blamed the lack of “Web 2.0″ development in Australia on the ‘audience’ because we weren’t willing to take the risk of mortgaging our houses, quitting jobs, etc to fund startups…well…he seemed a bit arrogant. Plus, the glasses that he wore really made him look ‘Bono-esque’.
-
Steve Marx
Go Deep With AJAX.Will fell asleep during this one. Steve’s presentations aren’t too bad, but he has a bit of a monotonous voice, it was late in the conference, and the stuff he covered was pretty boring.
“What is AJAX?”, followed by Microsoft’s implementation of that through ASP.NET. Yeah, I learnt a little about what controls were available in ASP.NET AJAX, but thats only because I haven’t played with ASP.NET yet. -
Closing Panel: Designers are from Venus, Developers are from Mars
This panel was made up of Lee Brimlow, Gerry Gaffney of Information and Design, Philip Beadle of Readify (Phil is a hilarious guy. He loved his Javascript work, as well as colouring things red – a true developer), Adam Kowaltzke of Avanade and Shane Morris as Moderator.
This panel was ‘funnier’, but by this time we were all mostly asleep (just because ReMIX was drawing to a close, not because they were boring.)The panel talked about ‘designers vs developers’ and ‘designers + developers’, both how it has been in the industry, and how it is changing, as well as roles that are popping up so it becomes ‘designers + devingers vs devingers + developers’ – an intermediate role which can do both, and is able to translate for both sides.
I’d like to consider myself a devigner, but I’m not so sure if anybody else would ;)I’m sure this was a better panel than what I’m able to blog about it, but as stated, we were all tired by here and just wanted to get home.
Overall…
ReMIX07 was a lot of fun. All of the presenters seemed to be very passionate about what they did/presented, which is a good start.
The presentations were of pretty good quality/design, although it wasn’t hard to tell the difference between ‘designers’ (or ‘devigners’ I guess) and ‘developers’ presenting.
Next year, it really needs free WiFi setup, as well as more powerpoints to recharge laptops. Those with laptops want to be able to fire up their computer, get to a Microsoft portal where we can download the slides (and maybe even the examples) so that we can compile whatever is on the big screen on our own computers – just so we can see it really work.
It wouldn’t hurt if they had fewer sessions that went for longer so they could cover the content a bit better.
I wouldn’t complain about better ‘free software’. MIX in Vegas got Expression Studio (and a ‘unique’ cover for each attendee no less) and Vista Ultimate (and random other goodies like a pen and memory stick). By comparison we got Expression Web, which is fairly hit-and-miss product.
I’m not trying to suggest that the only reason I went to ReMIX was for the free stuff, but its hard to get excited about Expression Web when the major session on it made it seem pathetic (which backed up my thoughts on my previous trial of Expression Web). If they had of given us Expression Blend, on the other hand, I would have been ecstatic as its a fantastic product.
Nick Hodge has a good round up of many ReMIX blog posts for those who are interested.
My apologies for posting this a week late, I’ve been a tad busy (more blog posts to follow, at around one per day or three). I also took a whole stack of photos, but not many of them turned out too well, so I’ve skipped them.
Comments
3 Comments
Trackbacks / Pingbacks
-
[...] Anymoose: http://www.aeoth.net/2007/07/02/remix07/ [...]
-
[...] looking pretty nice, I’m particularly interested in the XNA Development that wasn’t at Remix, although I’m disappointed about the lack of Cheezeburger Studio that was demonstrated at [...]
Thanx for the kind comments Paul :) I did have a lot of fun.