I will have no time to write real blog posts (I’m actually writing this during Robby Ingebretsen’s fantastic session: “Design Fundamentals for Developers”), but I will be updating on Twitter like a maniac. You can see my twitter feed here.
I’ll try to tweet something from every session I attend.
I’ve signed up for MIX 09, so I’ll be headed to Las Vegas this March. If you’re thinking about it, they’re having a pretty solid promotional where you can register for 40% off the standard cost with the RSVP code “MIXspecial1″.
Interesting stuff happening at MIX this year…
Johnny Lee, whose idea of using the Wiimote for multi-point interaction I shamelessly ripped off, will be giving a session on Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and Other HCI Projects). I’m curious to see if this gives us anything more than what we’ve seen in his previous videos.
Robby Ingebretsen is running the Design Fundamentals for Developers workshop. Robby has a great design sense and his talks are always entertaining. On the other side of that, there is the Cynergy workshop with Rick Barraza, Michael Wolf and Jose Fajerdo on Developing for Experience with 3 Heads. It would be a tough task to find a better design/development team and I look forward to their workshop.
Anyway… have a great holiday. I’m probably going to be offline for a while…
You can now check out all the MIX sessions, online.
I attended the following sessions:
Bringing Your Data to Life with Windows Presentation Foundation - Anson Tsao
This is a great crash course to data binding in WPF.
Building Rich Internet Applications using Microsoft Silverlight Part 1 - Mike Harsh and Joe Stegman
Building Rich Internet Application using Microsoft Silverlight Part 2 – Mike Harsh
Good walkthrough on building a basic Silverlight 2.0 application. You can get the files that accompany this talk at Mike Harsh’s blog. While attending these sessions, Mike and Joe repeatedly reccomended…
Creating Rich Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2 Controls – Karen Corby
This was possibly the most valuable session I attended. Karen Corby walks us through how to create custom controls in Silverlight. The result is mind-blowingly powerful… and it seemed not to difficult. I hesitate on saying that simply because I haven’t done it myself yet. 
I’m going to go back over it and walk myself through the whole thing with the source code that she has posted.
Nerd + Art : 10 Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist – Nathan Dunlap and Robby Ingebretsen
Two of the guys from Identity Mine walk through some great code snippets that allow designers a little more freedom to do the work they need to do. You can get the Code Snippet Visual Studio 2008 installer file and some of the samples used in the talk from the Identity Mine website.
Developing Applications with Microsoft VirtualEarth - Chris Pendleton
Christ Pendleton walked us through integrating VirtualEarth into Internet applications. Pretty cool, although I’m not sure how much better than Google’s Maps/Earth API this is. It’s been a while since I’ve played with Google Maps, but I remember it being much easier than I thought it would be. Keep an eye on Chris’ blog, where he’ll be posting the code for the lab shortly (I’m told).
Have you heard about Deep Zoom?
No… it is not a porno filmed exclusivly with the Canon 5200mm mirror lens (although that would actually be kind of kinky), it is Microsoft’s new, dangerously named technology for taking huge pictures and making them completely zoomable over the internet through Silverlight.
“How huge?” you may ask. Well, I don’t know if there is a hard limit, but the biggest one I saw was 14 petabytes.
Petabytes. With a “p”.
Basically, take your bedroom, and fill it top to bottom with those nifty little 500GB external back-up hard drives. And you can see any part of that image almost instantly by simply zooming in on the part you want to see.
To see a demo, you can look at the Hard Rock memorabilia page.
Well, with proper thanks to Robby Ingebretsen, Microsoft has released the Deep Zoom Composer, which allows us normal people to make and implement these kinds of super-zooming interfaces.
I’ll be working on it in the coming weeks and I’ll let you know what I come up with.
