Mix08 - Keynote Day 2

Just got back from the Steve Ballmer / Guy Kawasaki keynote at this year’s Mix. Is Guy ever not on form? He did a great job asking Steve the tough questions, making it fun, and getting a few candid answers, along with some “PR” answers as well, including Steve’s cautious response to “What about [...]

Download links related to Mix08 Keynote Announcements

Head over to Tim Sneath’s blog for a list of all download links related to the keynote this morning.

And then my battery died. But…

…one the most amazing and unexpected announcements of the whole keynote came for me in a WPF demo towards the end. In an update to WPF that should be available some time this summer, we’re going to get SHADER SUPPORT in WPF. Yes, that kind of shader. WPF team, I love you guys.

Mix08 Keynote - Silverlight & WPF

First let’s get to the obvious Silverlight announcements we “knew” were coming during this keynote: - Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available! - Expression Blend 2.5 (!) March Preview is available! - formal announcement of Silverlight Mobile device support! In my presentation last weekend I was asked about Silverlight adoption stats, which I predicted we’d get during the keynote. [...]

Mix08 Keynote - Internet Explorer 8

After a brief intro by Scott Guthrie, the technical component of the keynote began with Dean Hackamovitch’s first public demo of IE8. I know that this conference is fundamentally about connected systems, and the web browser is a vitally important component. But I thought this was a profoundly boring way to begin the technical announcement part of [...]

Mix08 Keynote - parting thoughts

I’ve just stepped out from the first Mix Keynote I’ve attended as a consultant rather than a Microsoftie.  There was no real shocker in there, but it was a solid keynote and I am enthused by a couple of exciting announcements Ray Ozzie began by saying he sees Mix08 as one of several milestones on a [...]

Off to Vegas!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my WPF and Silverlight presentation at the Toronto CodeCamp event yesterday. It was great to have a chance to speak with so many interested and enthusiastic people who hung around after the talk. Because the presentation was a riff on my What’s New in WPF 3.5 and Silverlight [...]

User Experience in Toronto and Las Vegas

I’m presenting at the Toronto Code Camp on Saturday about What’s new in Visual Studio 2008 for WPF 3.5 and Silverlight developers. My presentation will be an updated version of the presentation I gave at ObjectSharp’s Visual Studio 2008 At the Movies event, which hopefully you’ll find interesting and useful if you’re doing client-side [...]

Are your CLR-based apps leaking?

I can’t resist linking to a superb article in the WPF Performance blog on finding memory leaks in WPF-based applications. Particularly interesting is the section pertaining to Event Handler-based leaks. Here’s the brief summary, from the article: In general, if you do this: Foo.SomeEvent += new EventHandler(Bar.SomeMethod) Then when you done using Bar, but you are [...]

WPF Developer Tools I Can’t Code Without

1. Visual Studio 2008. Express Edition is free. But the story doesn’t end here… 2. Expression Blend 2. Current build is the December Preview. I’m guessing the next drop will happen around Mix08 in March. Does a much better job of visually editing XAML (for instance, elements in Resource Dictionaries) than [...]