MIX’11 keynote summary, day 1

It’s time for MIX again! Microsoft’s number one conference for web and phone enthusiasts kicked off in Las Vegas. The first keynote day covered web development, the second one will zero in on phone thingies. Here are the highlights from the first day’s keynotes.

Internet Explorer

imageDean Hachamovitch kicks off the keynote – and he’s wearing a “TEN” T-shirt hinting at IE 10.

  • Examples of real world HTML 5 applications: Foursquare Playground, SVG animation, Director’s Cut (a tool you can use to create custom Bon Jovi music videos), World’s Biggest Pacman, …
    • Lots of boasting on IE 9’s performance, but little else. Still, it’s been a while since a new high-end HTML site recommended a Firefox user to pick up IE 9 (as Foursquare Playground does).
  • IE 9 patterns: A segment of keynote that focused on celebrating IE9’s developer readiness
    • http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/ – Microsoft’s web site on emerging
    • In the future, platform previews will appear between 8-12 weeks instead of 8 right now; Microsoft feels this will provide more efficient changes and ability to hear the community feedback.
  • Looking forward: IE10 has been developed for three weeks now
    • Improved CSS3 support (visual effects, columns, grid layouts, …). High speed is still a priority, and heavily demoed.
    • Platform Preview 1 is now available for download
    • IE10 demos were run on an ARM machine with 1 GB of memory, demoing the capacity to run (fast) on an ARM machine.
  • PDC 2011 will be held on 13th-16th September in Anaheim, California (the PDC site isn’t up to date yet though).

Developer tooling and server end

Scott Guthrie on the stage, turning the focus back into the server end.

  • Now shipping ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Updateimage
    • New project templates, including a “use HTML5” switch, NuGet packages pre-installed
    • Entity Framework 4.1 (including code-first capabilities)
    • New jQuery version 1.5 shipping
    • Modernizr – another open source library shipping with Visual Studio through NuGet. This one makes it easier to use HTML5 and still have a working down-level experience.
    • New scaffolding support: Creating a code-first model also creates controllers, views and whatnot.
    • Demo: Creating a simply administrative interface to a podcast. The highlight of the demo was definitely building a code-first model, which then resulted in a generated database, controllers and views, including database constraints and values. Not useful everywhere, but certainly helps in quite a few scenarios.
  • WebMatrix demo: Building a front-end. Demo included buying a web site template from TemplateMonster and using it to whip up a quick web site with WebMatrix, including lots of easy helpers for social features, packge-based helper installation and other stuff.
  • Orchard (an open-source CMS to which Microsoft is contributing code): image
    • Again, returning to WebMatrix, and building a site using Orchard downloaded from the Web Gallery.
    • Version 1.1 now available; the new version is definitely much cleaner than the previous ones.
    • Also heavy demoing of Orchard modules, downloadable and installable pretty much like WordPress plugins. Potential new business opportunity, once all the Microsoft-savvy developers get into WordPress-style development?
  • Windows Azure: Releasing new versions of Access Control Service, Caching and Content Delivery Network, and a feature called Traffic Manager. Not much detail in the keynote though, but look forward to the coming days.
  • Umbraco project founder on stage to discuss the CMS:
    • 10 000 active developers around the world – not bad for an ASP.NET open source project
    • Touting Windows Azure support: Umbraco supports automatic scaling, allowing the admin to specify tolerances. Umbraco will then adjust the number of Azure nodes needed to serve the site properly. Now downloadable: Windows Azure Accelerator for Umbraco

April 12, 2011 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET, Web

2 Responses

  1. gyurisc - April 13, 2011

    Thanks for the summary, I really like the new ASP.NET MVC project template. Cheers from Hungary :)

  2. Angel17 - February 28, 2023

    Thanks for sharing that recipe. Keep sharing! Fence Installation Amarillo, TX

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