Chris Barr

MIX ’09 Days 2 & 3

Friday, March 20, 2009

Wow, this conference has been a lot more involved than I initially thought, and I haven't been able to do the daily blog post that I was hoping to. My initial impression was that I would go back to my hotel around 5, and then be able to chill out and browse the web and write my blog posts. It turns out there’s a lot of great optional Mix ’09 related stuff to do after the official ending time, plus my hotel has no web access!

Day 2

Day 2 opened with an awesome keynote presentation. They really had the atmosphere down to get everyone pumped up. While we waited for the keynote to begin, they had a cool app called running on the big screens which grabbed tweets and Flickr photos tagged with “MIX09" and they all dropped in like tetris blocks. Also, some sweet tunes by the DJ.

Finally they keynote began with a great speech by Bill Buxton where he talked about how important good design is. This was followed up by Scott Guthrie making announcements about ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Silverlight 3. All of which I am thoroughly impressed with.

People from Netlix, NBC, Stack Overflow, Vertigo, and a few others came up and talked about how they use all this technology. I will have to say the most interesting part for me was when the VP of Netflix came up and demoed how their Sliverlight player works with bandwidth throttling and al they debug information. You can watch the entire keynote online here.

Right after this we attended sessions about what’s new in ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m very excited about the changes coming to both of these technologies. Most notable (for me anyway) in ASP.NET 4.0 is better control over viewstate, and the ability to control client ID’s that get rendered out! You can watch this entire presentation online as well.

Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) presented on what was new in Visual Studio 2010, and there’s so many great changes! Most notably are big speed improvements and a complete interface overhaul. Check out the picture below, it’s a word cloud of the most typed things in Visual Studio. Larger items are typed more frequently. They’ve come up with some great ways to resolve this by adding in custom code snippets. You just type the word “listview" (or “lvw", or whatever you define) and it puts all the code that you need or a listview out there!

Later that night there was a party at an amazing club called Tao. Free drinks and nerds everywhere! We met up with Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) and Juan Rivera (who’s writing full PHP support for Visual Studio) and got to pick their brains about what they do, the future of Visual Studio, programing conventions, and all kinds of cool stuff. Overall, we had a great time talking with them.

(not my photo)

Then the party moved up to a section of Tao called Tao Beach, which turned out to be on the freaking roof of the Venitian hotel! It was just like you see in the movies, amazing! We met up with Jarrod and Geoff from Stack Overflow, just hung out and talked for a while.

(not my photos)

Day 3

Day 3 opened with another keynote, which we dicided to skip; and this turned out to be a good idea. The only big announcement was that Internet Explorer 8 was released and now available for download. We heard a lot of that that it was a pretty boring presentation other than that.

More sessions with some great content, and some that were just ok. Around lunchtime they had a small Q&A with Scott Guthrie moderated by Scott Hanselman. This seemed to be mostly focused on Silverlight, but it was still a pretty cool thing to attend. Plus, I got a picture with him!

Afterwards, Scott Hanselman hosted a session about how he built NerdDinner.com using ASP.NET MVC. I learned a lot about MVC, which looks great, and Scott presented all the information really well. That was my first time hearing him speak, and he’s really got a way of communicating well with the audience.

Later that night we went to check out a session where Mix ’09 attendees could show off past work they had made. We got there late, but it was still interesting for what we saw. After that we were able to just walk around the city and take some photos.