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March 15, 2010
MIX10 Keynote, Day 1
MIX10 is all abuzz with Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7. So let’s get right to the meat of it.
You know it’s going to be a demo-packed keynote when ScottGu is the opening speaker. He’s known for talking a little, demo’ing a lot, and writing code onstage. Today was no different. Here’s how the keynote went down.
Silverlight 4
- Deployed > 60% of desktops (was 45% at PDC in November)
- Large enterprises starting to adopt
- Consumer sites: MLS, NBC Olympics, Sunday Night Football, Netflix, Bing Maps, Victoria’s Secret, UFC, McDonalds, NCAA March Madness
- Vancouver Olympics
- 12 million hours streamed, up to 76 minutes in a single stream, up to 720p
- IIS Smooth Streaming
- live ad injection
- rough-cut editor written in SL for immediate highlight publishing
- open source player and tools: http://smf.codeplex.com
- New features in SL4 RC
- Fullscreen on secondary monitor
- Pivot control for large data set visualization
Windows Phone 7
Windows Phone 7 is VERY similar to iPhone and Android (not surprisingly). It has a very Zune-y flavor, but a lot of the interactions are very similar. Basic facts:
- Every device is a Zune
- Dev platform: Silverlight 3 + XNA
- 3 buttons on the bottom: start, search, back
- UI Leverages the Pivot control
- App bar – common place to find application buttons, sits at the bottom of the app’s UI – is expandable vertically as well as contextual so that you can offer different choices based on app state
- Item delete – small checkboxes next to the item; check one and they all get bigger so you can check more
- Start Menu
- Main screen has tiles for each app; each tile is live and can animate its content, etc.
- Press and hold to rearrange/delete apps like iPhone
- Hubs
- A hub is a pivot with content/apps that are similar, e.g., Music, Photos, People, etc.
- Panoramic UI – content wider than screen with columnar panning
- Applications can plug into a hub – e.g., a photo editing app would sit in the Photos hub as opposed to living in a random list
- Monetization
- Because it’s silverlight, you have rich ad content opportunities
- Full hardware acceleration for max performance
The development platform is one that is very familiar to Windows devs.
- Same programming model/code/tools as desktop SL3 apps
- Visual Studio 10
- Templates for blank app, list-based app with navigation, class library
- Can test on emulator (which is FAST) or the device
- Emulator supports MultiTouch on Windows 7 so you can test right there!
- Blend 4
- Can build an app just like you would build a regular SL app
- Can launch testing on emulator from within Blend
- Features
- Media (DEMO: Netflix. Great fidelity for the media.)
- Deep Zoom (DEMO: Graphic.ly)
- 3D (DEMO: XBox Live game)
- Location/map (DEMO: foursquare)
- Push Notifications (DEMO: MLS)
- Microphone/Camera (DEMO: Shazam for microphone)
- Accelerometer (DEMO: “Marionette” – funny)
- Other demos
- seesmic plugging in Bing maps
- Coding4Fun Cannon – controlling a cannon that shoots T-Shirts using the accelerometer
- XNA gaming
Overall, the technology seems exciting. The dev story is way better than on Android. I can’t speak for iPhone. But if Microsoft is able to deliver on the handsets and market them well, they should be able to get developers writing apps – god knows there are enough of us .NETters out there waiting to write apps. ;)
If you want to watch the keynote, go to http://live.visitmix.com/. I haven’t seen it there yet, but it will be soon, I’m sure.
UPDATE: here’s the on-demand video gallery.
Posted by eburke at March 15, 2010 3:13 PM