MIX10 Day 1 Keynote highlights

Allright! MIX10 has been kicked off with day one. Here’s my list of highlights of the keynote announcements. You can also check out the keynote video. The following notes also contain some references to various offsets in the video.

  • The Keynote started with a Bing Maps video (21:50 – 24:20) featuring Blaise Aguera y Arcas. Fascinating stuff with augmented reality. If you haven’t checked his TED performance out yet, take a look. Also, if you’re into playing with Bing Maps, try discoverbingmaps.com.
  • Silverlight 4 Release Candidate is now available (including development tools for VS 2010)
    • Final Silverlight 4 release coming in April
    • Silverlight penetration now 60% (was 45% at PDC – quite a rapid adoption in just four months)
    • The Vancouver Olympics video player and Silverlight-based video editor (Rough Cut) published as open source: smf.codeplex.com
    • Lots of features were already announced in PDC09. If you’re not familiar with the “old new features”, check out Tim Heuer’s blog post.
    • Added: Support for full-screen HD on one screen while you continue working with another.
    • Pivot control (a faceted information set browser announced at PDC09) will be published. If Pivot is not familiar to you, check getpivot.com. There’s also a starting point for the Pivot control in the Silverlight Team Blog.
    • eBay is using Silverlight to create a rather cool web app to add items onto eBay. Features include webcam-based barcode scanning, image drag and drop from your desktop and so on (see 36:40 – 48:30).
  • Expression Blend 4 is coming, with phone support (see more below)
    • Free upgrade from Expression Blend 3 will be available
  • Windows Phone 7
    • Lots of applications and UI solutions demoed. If you want to see how Windows Phone 7 works, check out the keynote video. Much more content than what we saw during the Barcelona conference! See the keynote video at offset 49:50-1:16:30 for details.
    • Demoed an Xbox Live –powered 3D shooting game. It looked good. On a phone. Whoa. See 1:14:30 – 1:16:10.
    • Netflix has been one of the poster children for Silverlight in all the launches. No surprise here, they now have a IIS smooth streaming app on Windows Phone as well, streaming on-demand videos right to your phone.

Windows Phone 7 apps are developed using Silverlight

This was already announced earlier on, but it received a lot of more details during the keynote, as Scott Guthrie demoed building a couple of applications with Visual Studio 2010.

  • Initially, WP7 development will be based on an extended version of Silverlight 3, and Silverlight 4 support will be coming later.
  • Both Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4 will have free phone development editions. XNA Game Studio 4.0 will also be available for free.
  • VS2010 contains a WYSIWYG design surface, including dragging & dropping of controls and a very familiar code-behind model.
  • Expression Blend 4 has a Windows Phone 7 emulator, as does Visual Studio 2010.
    • Solutions can be tested on a phone (via a USB cable) or run through an emulator inside VS or Blend. Debugging works normally, at least in the emulator (no idea if it works against the actual phone though).
    • The emulator also supports multi-touch on Windows 7, giving an experience reasonably close to an actual phone.
    • The emulator is actually a virtual machine running WP7, so it’s far more realistic than many emulators.
  • If you’re more interested in the designer experience, check out the keynote video at 1:27-1:38. A very interesting look into using Expression Blend with phones.
  • There will be a full-fledged marketplace support right in the phone. Developers can create one binary and distribute that, and the platform provides support for providing limited-use trial versions as well as buying the full ones.
  • Development tools are available now at developer.windowsphone.com.

What’s next?

Tomorrow’s keynote will be about ASP.NET, services-based web development and IE 9. And it’s streamed live too, so get yourself to live.visitmix.com for the details! (9AM PDT, 4PM UTC, 6PM Finnish time)

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March 16, 2010 · Jouni Heikniemi · One Comment
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, Web

One Response

  1. Heikniemi Hardcoded » MIX10 Day 2 Keynote highlights - March 16, 2010

    [...] 1 was focused on Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, and it wasn’t a bad day at all. Can Day 2 top that? Judge yourself, here’s my summary for the [...]

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