Remix’07 Conference Overview

As you all probably know we joined the Remix'07 conference in Hungary on 11-12 June 2007. This visitation was meant to brighten our vision on the cutting edge technologies and to allow us make new contacts with other companies in the ICT domain. The more info we have the more flexible and adequate to the future demands we can be.

Re/mix conferences are hosted by Microsoft and as expected they strongly advertise their newest technologies as WPF and Silverlight along with the new development tools and services as Orcas, Expression Studios and Windows Live Services. Each attendee of the conference received a 60 days evaluation copy of Expression Studio products.

The first day of the conference begun at about 9:00AM on 11 of June in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. The place and the atmosphere were unique; there were a lot of nice paintings hanging on the walls, regretfully we could not take any of them because of the security guardsJ.

The conference was open with a key note made by Scott Guthrie (Full agenda). He made a short overview of MS technologies and introduced Silverlight again promising clear and bright future, as if somebody has expected him to tell anything else. There were a lot of questions about Silverlight and almost all of the answers were something like 'no, it is not available at this moment', 'we cannot support it because of security reasons or any other reason', 'sorry I cannot tell you at that moment' etc. The final impression (later confirmed again and again) was that Silverlight was a raw technology that became available to the developer's community to early (because of unknown/known reasons). But besides this we have to be aware of it and what it can offer.

I can tell that this presentation was pretty much everything that worth's it watching in the first day of the conference. There we two more precious sessions later and they were: 'Search Engine Optimization with Rich Media' - Pete LePage and 'thinking in CSS: How to Build Great Looking Sites' - Molly Holzschlag. The sessions related to Silverlight actually repeated everything said before again and again but from a different point of view and/or with different words.

There was one session we could not visit 'Developing Gadgets for Windows Live, Vista Sidebar and your own Site' held by Steve Marx. The opinions later were both positive and negative and according to what I heard it was too general presentation so no regrets.

The second day was much more useful to me, because of two persons Paul Dawson & Wayne Smith. They are true professionals that know what they do and know how to present it to us, the visitors. In general this day was focused more on WPF, Windows Live services and some Web stuff like AJAX.

Key note topic was 'WPF and Silverlight: Creating designs that will Captivate not Intimidate users In this session, Paul Dawson from Conchango, one of Europe's leading web design agencies will explore the shift that WPF and other technologies will place on the expectations of consumers; but also how when given powerful design tools, it's important to make sure that your design is always on target for your audience, and you're not designing for the sake of it. He'll look at some techniques and tricks to use to make sure that design in WPF is always on target, in part by looking at the different ways in which designers and developers work together with WPF and Silverlight'. Paul did his job very well his message was simple and clear 'WPF and Silverlight can dramatically improve the way your staff are presented to the user no matter online or offline'. He is such kind of person that prefers to focus the audience's attention to one or two precious things instead of to 100 that are not so important.

Wayne Smith was the other guy that did his job great. He created a photo album application in Expression Studio Blend in just 50 minutes without writing even single line of code. The photo album was based on external xml data file describing the structure of the available galleries along with the belonging pictures. Using only the designer he managed to bind a list box to the galleries node in the xml and later to bind a second list box to the pictures that belong to the selected gallery from the first list box - simple parent child relation but based on xml data source. According to Wayne the thing that makes WPF and the whole bunch of products around it so unique and useful is that it allows you to make the presentation layer (UI) the way you want it using skins, themes etc. nevertheless your designer will be able to make your application UI on his own instead of giving you pictures that you have to bring to life. It is interesting that in WPF the events are actually named triggers and there are some new concepts for properties different than the one in .NET 2.0. There a lot of useful features and tools that can make your application look stunning with very little efforts.

George Moore's session was on 'Windows Live Services provides a wide range of experiences to millions of users' world-wide (e.g. Hotmail, Messenger, Search, Spaces, Maps, etc)'. This session was a little bit boring, but it can be treated as a demo to the API's that MS intend to offer in future. This idea as anything else but a new, MS is trying get back in the game. Most of the services are available free of charge even now in Beta and Alpha versions. The future price politic of MS regarding sites that are using their services is: You have to pay only in case you have > 1 million unique users per month and the price will be 0.25 cents per unique user per month. For the ones interested in these services visit their site.

As a resume I can say that this was a useful conference to visit! There were not many new things to learn or to see but the atmosphere and people we meet there make it worth it. Moreover Budapest is a wonderful city, if you have not been there; my advice is to visit it!

Below you can find some links mentioned at the conference:

http://www.conchango.com - Paul Dawson's company official web site

http://www.hmvdigital.com – Online music, site developed by Conchango

http://metaliq.com - Beau Ambur's company official web site

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/78e3c1ae-c2cc-49cd-b1aa-c6a56b7b0ab01033.mspx - XPS viewer of .xps documents.

http://www.csszengarden.com/ - CSS sites pool