I attended 3 sessions yesterday afternoon, all very interesting.
MySpace megasite
Quite interesting talk by the MySpace team about what strategies they are using to run, maintain and upgrade what must be one of trhe busiest website worldwide. The sheer volume of video, MP3 and pictures theys deliver simultanously is tremendous. And all that runs on ASP.NET and Microsoft platforms. Very impressive. They also developed their own tools for code management, allowing to release and if necessary rollback code.
It was nice to see that session because I had attended last year's same session, so we could see the progression.
The future of webcomic reading
Great session! Nathan Dunlap and Robbie Ingebretsen from IdentityMine had prepared an excellent show. I love to see these two talk because Nathan is probably one of the best UI designer around, and Robbie one of the best developers (with a very, very strong skill for design too) Both were part of the Microsoft WPF team and designed/implemented a lot of features, so they know the stuff from the inside. I feel privileged to have built a great relationship with them since the course IdentityMine gave us
in Tacoma last month.
Their presentation was actually made using the webcomic reader that they were also demonstrating. It's hard to describe how good the presentation was, so you should definitely check it by yourself when it will be posted on
visitmix.com.
They also handed out goodies, among them the first edition (on paper) of the IdentityMen comic, the comic they used for the presentation. Also available was a card allowing to download their Blendable controls, a newly released set of controls with a lot of great simple but useful ideas. Make sure you check it out on
www.blendables.com/.
Using LINQ to Dramatically Improve Data Driven Development in Web Applications
Great session too, by
Anders Hejlsberg himself. Anders is the C# chief architect, and gave us a very short intro followed by a huge demo demonstrating the abilities of LINQ. I am very much looking forward to work with LINQ, especially to simplify greatly the tedious task of parsing XML files and creating CLR objects. Yes, LINQ can also be used for this! The thing I like is the possibility to use the same syntax to query against any kind of datastore, including XML, CLR objects (any IEnumerable) or of course relational databases.
Freebies
A nice "side effect" to coming to MIX, I am going back home with a free copy of Vista Ultimate and of Expression Studio. That's good value :-)
IdentityMine party at Zeffirino
To end a great day, I was invited to IdentityMine's party at Zeffirino, an italian restaurant in the Grand Canal shoppe area. Thjis place is surreal, because the ceiling is painted blue with clouds, and even late it feels like it's middoe of the afternoon.
The dinner went great, I was sitting at a table with guys from ElectricRain (the makers of Zam3D), from FrogDesign, and from IdentityMine. I had a great discussion about the integrator role, the designer - developer collaboration, really the level of experience and of knowledge at that table was just huge. I felt very humble, but I had a great time!
Finally, I made it back to my room, but unfortunately I slept only 3.5 hours before the jet lag woke me up... and to think that I am going out again tonight (I have a ticket for Le Cirque du Soleil Mistery) (I know, noone forces me)
Print | posted on Tuesday, May 01, 2007 9:52 AM