Mix06 – Day 2 so far so bored…

OK, it is starting to get a little tedious, microsoft really doesn’t have much to show at this conference and most of the sessions I’m attending now seem to be a rehash of previous content, maybe it is just that i have a laser focus on the developer issues and there is only a limited number of products they are pimping for my particular demographic.

I’m going to focus more of my time for the remainder of the conference on the sandbox environment stuff that MS has provided and will be kicking the tires on the Atlas framework for Ajaxy development.

some keypoints.

1. WPF is cleary the equivalent of the quartz layer on the Mac
2. With WPF/E and Expressions MS is making a move against the macrodobe product line.

Free (as in Beer) stuff

1.Microsoft Visual Web Developer think Homesite/Dreamweaver from MS
2.SQL Server 2005 free edition
3.Cassini webserver for the .net dev stack

Mix06 – Day 1 General Observations

The thing that is most striking to me about this event so far is how much it should really be called MeToo06 as it all really seems to be about Microsoft waking up and trying to catch up with competitor initiatives.

Quite a few mactops around, and in fact in most every session microsoft is shouting support for the major browsers. I think this is part of the reaction to the terrible CSS implementation in IE, every creative type that has to write any CSS code is constantly reminded of just how much more complex life is a result of IE and most CSS out there contains comments like ‘/* IE box HACK craptastic */’ . I think this has had a cumulative effect on the perception of MS as the undesirable player in the arena.

IE7 looks pretty good, less crap around the screen but really nothing to get too excited about unless you get excited about software working the way it was supposed to work in the first place.

One thing of interest was a comment from Bill Gates this morning on how much the drWatson error reporting back to MS has really improved windows a surprising amount and that they feel it is likely contributed to the stability of XP (such as it is) more than any QA stuff they could possible do.

Die Macrodobe Die !

Just been in a presentation for the Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the new directX based UI technology, it is basically Quartz for Windows Vista. The idea is to provide rich apps. (ye gods, how many times will they use the term ‘rich’ I think they misunderstood Gates wanting to get richer from the web and came up with the hook rich rich rich…)

One of the fundamental changes in the vista is the replacement of GDI (so windows 3.0) with a directX based render layer. This is what they are calling Windows Presentation Foundation and is simply Microsoft’s response to the bar being raised by Apple with Quartz.

HOWEVER where things start to get interesting is in the area of web applications, MS is releasing WPF/E Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere and it is nothing less than a full blown assault on Macrodobe Flash using the full WPF for ultra slick UI that extend out beyond the bounding box of Flash apps.

I see a few problems with the approach, firstly it requires use of a proprietary markup language XAML, secondly it will be tough to break the design developers out from under Macrodobe, but the biggest advantage, especially for those concerned with SEO, is that the markup is on the page and is therefore visible to search engines, and content managment applications which is a BIG problem for FLASH content.

At least one application is available that was built using the WPF/E microsoftMax is a photolisting app, that allows you to share lists of photos as albums and is very slick indeed from a UI perspective, whether it has the legs to affect the other players in the photoshare space I doubt, but it will likely be shipping with vista so MS can always use the new PC channel to push product so who knows what’ll happen.

Advertising is a software problem.

Mix06 session on the Microsoft adCenter. Basically it is an adwords ‘clone’ with some extra features, once again the onus is MS to play catch up with other platforms.

The best quote was ‘advertising is a software problem’ and this is clearly the way MS are approaching it. The adCenter has a fairly useable API, and some plus features such as demographic context to refine ad bids. Also they are storing time series data to allow some insight into peak usage and refine bids accordingly. The example provided was for wedding gowns, which peak in the summer for purchases as most wedding are at the end of the summer, but the peak time for search terms was jan/feb, so a better ad bid strategy can be developed once you understand the seasonality of the search terms.

the problem with the demographic stuff, which demoed well, is that they really only have demo data on MS passport users.

MS Research has about 50 developers working on future green field r+d, this will
bring things like multistage campaigns etc to the search ad space.

the pilot for adCenter is at http://advertising.msn.com/msn-adcenter/signup
and the promocode to get on for free is ‘Redmond’

the contact for the API is natalam@microsoft.com.

IE7 the future

a bunch of demos and stuff on IE7, Atlas (UI Ajaxy toolkit) It seems to be based on two initiatives.

1. catch up with Firefox and Opera (proper CSS support, tabs, page scaling etc)
2. Presentation Framework, this seems to be an attempt to push a FLASH killer
app.

As i attend the sessions specific to the technologies, i’ll post some more.