While we were at MIX, we were given an opportunity to peek into the upcoming book from Charles Petzold on Windows Phone development. He has released a preview of the book that you can download now.
Check it out here:
Enjoy!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Key Takeaways from MIX 2010
I had an opportunity to attend MIX this year in Las Vegas. I hadn’t been before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. Marketed as a conference for the web doesn’t do it justice – or maybe it’s just because the technologies that Microsoft now brings to the table to satisfy web development is so rich and diverse – but there is a LOT of information there for folks even if they’re not doing web development.
So what were the big takeaways? The message that I came away with was that there were four big areas of focus:
Silverlight
Impressive stuff here. Silverlight 4 really has stepped up to be a 1st Class desktop citizen. It’s ability to run as an out-of-browser application with elevated privileges really bridges the gap between older versions and WPF. I am honestly asking myself if we are seeing Microsoft make WPF irrelevant? While at MIX they demoed Silverlight running on the Windows Phone 7 platform and the Xbox. All with the ability to leverage the Expression Blend designer tool, which is an extremely powerful tool in it’s own right – probably unparalleled for XAML layout.
A big announcement from Microsoft was that they were making the development tools for Windows Phone development FREEEE. You can download them from here.
Cloud Computing
While I didn’t get the opportunity to attend but one session on Windows Azure, it was enough to convince me that it will make a big impact on design decisions for companies that want a fast low cost entry into a secure, reliable, and scalable environment in which to host their apps. This is a very new area, particularly for me, but the advantages are immediately obvious when you look at them – reliable, secure, scalable, open standards-based.
One new service called AppFabric that will really make this shine allows for Azure to integrate with on-premise applications. Imagine being able to run your LOB applications in the Cloud and take advantage of it’s capabilities, but also allow them to reach back into your network for secure data or other internal resources. Very powerful.
Open Data Protocol
While the last thing we want (or need) is another data access acronym to go along with ADO and all of its predecessors, OData (short for Open Data Protocol) is Microsoft’s commitment to data integration and interoperability. Many of the MIX sessions demonstrated consuming data using OData syntax through the browser, through RESTful web services. I expect this will be a game changer when it comes to how we write data services.
During the conference, numerous demos gave the same message – OData will make it possible to mash together data from numerous disparate sources and provide a seamless and compelling user experience. Imagine pulling data from Netflix, the local movie theaters in your area, and your own personal movie database to provide a single application on your phone to search movies. Now imagine doing that using a standards-based syntax that makes it equally easy to consume any/all of those data sources. Now imagine that you want to serve up your data using OData and being able to do it completely from within your web browser! All demoed this week!
IE9
The sessions didn’t have anything to do with the vNext version of Internet Explorer; however, the Day 2 keynote gave us some peeks into what’s in store for IE9. First – it’s FAST. Second – it’s standards based. Third – Did I mention it was fast? It was amazingly fast for developer code. It features a completely redesigned rendering engine that will leverage the power of multi-core CPUs. The demonstration of some of its polygon rendering capabilities and performance were quite compelling.
Its support for HTML5 and video were amazing. The other browsers will finally have something to catch up to. Watching streaming HD video at full frame rates with 50% of the CPU utilization of competitors was impressive – especially since the others were dropping frames like hot rocks.
That said, I’m still leery of the security issues that have plagued IE in the past. Let’s hope they’ve (or will) resolved those.
Summary
Collectively, these technologies come together to provide a rich development, deployment, and support environment. I expect them to go WAY beyond the development of just web applications.
I plan on writing more about each of these as I get the opportunity to explore them and employ them in my projects.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Starting Down the Path of Android Development
Awhile back I decided to begin doing some Windows Mobile development. Overall, it’s been a good experience and the tool support from VS2008 is excellent. The ability to debug your mobile app in a virtual device emulator is extremely helpful to visualize how your app will run on the target device platform.
However, now that I’ve had the chance to begin using the Motorola Droid and seeing their marketplace application, which gives access to scores of free and pay apps, it has convinced me that I need to begin looking at developing for this platform as well. In the short time that I’ve used this new phone, it’s clear that the user experience is far superior to WM6. Not having seen the new Windows Mobile 7 platform more than a couple of screenshots, it does look like it WM7 could be a strong competitor though.
My next posts will be about ramping up and getting started with a basic application for this platform. It should be exciting and hopefully I can help share some of the stumbling blocks that I run across to save you a bit of your own frustration.
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