MIX10 Day 2 Keynote highlights

Day 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 keynote.

Internet Explorer 9

  • Platform preview version announced, now ready for download.
    • Updates coming approximately every 8 weeks
  • IE 9 planned from the ground to enable HTML 5 applications.
  • Performance improvements are key
    • Reiterated the story: It’s not just JavaScript performance, but the performance of the entire stack.
    • New IE9 JavaScript engine “Chakra”: Practically on par with other modern browsers.
      • Background compilation on separate threads, utilizing multicore
    • Much of the performance improvements come from GPU-based acceleration.
      • Demoed IE9’s superior performance in graphical applications (such as 3d transformations). IE9 uses DirectX.
      • Subpixel anti-aliasing for text (using DirectWrite). Already announced in PDC, now demoed again.
  • Standards support promised
    • Claimed that IE9 will be sufficiently standards-compliant that no more code forking is needed.
      • The team crawled 7000 top sites to find out which APIs are used “in the real world” – meaning that there is still no full commitment to just specifications, but definitely a focus on real world usage.
    • The ACID3 score is 55/100, but more progress is promised.
    • IE9 team contributing tests for HTML features to W3C
  • HTML 5 video supported
    • Performance demonstrated as vastly better than Chrome
    • Not available in the platform preview, coming as an update
  • SVG 1.1 supported
  • Revised developer tools included, looked a lot like Firebug
    • Including a network traffic monitor tool

“Services powering Experiences”

  • Basic story: No more just browser-based access, but also APIs – most sites will want to publish their data through an API, either for their own use (RIA clients, AJAX, mobile) or for public use
  • OData presented as a solution to the services powered web
    • Extends existing standards (Atom mostly)
    • Adds query features
    • Returns not just extended Atom, but also JSON
    • Easy implementation
      • Server side can be implemented on Microsoft Platform with zero code (WCF Data Service)
      • On the client end, VS2010 supports OData as a service reference, with an experience similar to WCF/SOAP references – including LINQ based query support.
      • Visual Studio extension for OData visualization available
      • OData support for iPhone announced as well, Palm-based OData browser demonstrated
      • In SharePoint 2010, every list will expose an OData endpoint. And yeah, Excel 2010’s PowerPivot plugin will also be an OData consumer.
    • .NET OData Client released under Apache license (a rather surprising choice), available today
    • NetFlix OData Catalog API as a preview customer’
    • SQL Azure will support OData exposure through a web configuration, without writing an application layer at all.
    • All OData SDKs and clients now available at http://www.odata.org/developers/odata-sdk.
  • News on Codename “Dallas”, pushed as the way to monetize (or just distribute) your open APIs
    • Updated from PDC09 with a new beta
    • Lots of new data providers, now open for everybody

Miscellaneous

  • Highlighted a few Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2.0 features, but nothing really new. It’s still coming in April.
  • Confessed jQuery love and confirmed further commitment to it
    • Microsoft will be making code contributions to jQuery, as well as QA/testing work.
    • John Resig, creator of jQuery appeared as a guest speaker, praising the co-operation. Guess this is some sort of a pinnacle of Microsoft Open Source collaboration so far.
    • Demoed jQuery-driven client-based templating, which will be published as a jQuery plugin
  • Announcing Codename “Houston”
    • Silverlight-based SQL Server Management Studio for SQL Azure

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

One Response

  1. Heikniemi Hardcoded » Internet Explorer 9, web standards and Acid3 - March 22, 2010

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