PreMIX 2007 Live @ Geek Terminal

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Update: I am updating the recent posts about REMIX 2007 to provide you with more photos, reviews and contents.

In short, REMIX 2007 is Singaporean Version of MIX 2007, which is a conference held in Las Vegas, for web developers, designers and decision makers. And PREMIX 2007 is an event organized by Microsoft and The Digital Movement to get people in Singapore aware of the core technology Microsoft is developing, and advance and easiness of the technology.

The room HAS ONLY 5 GIRLS! ONE does not understand this technology…yet. (I hope that she understands now!)

Nic Fillingham from Microsoft started the event by giving us a brief introduction to MIX 2007 and REMIX 2007, with the purpose of doing the preview event, which is explained above. If you still unsure, you can leave you comments here.

Leon Brown introduced to the audience the current shipping version of Microsoft Expression Studio, and he explained to me later that Microsoft started the development of version 2 right after the start of shipping version 1. This might be the best practice in business, but it makes a developer me happy: we can always have something new to play with: Blend 2 CTP is neat, for those of us working on the new version of Sliverlight.

Lee Brimelow, a senior design technologist from frog design, presented to us his work using Window Presentation Foundation (WPF). He started developing on WPF a year ago, which is not that long, but the demos he presented, those blew my mind away. The demos were awesome. You can write to him to ask for the code

1.Static Model Rotation
2.Video Player Rotation
3.Flickr:the New Hello World Program
4.Keyboard Input -> Rotating 3D text
5. Rotating 3D circles(More shots here)

Find more shots in my photostream

And a two short demos:

Flickr Cube:

New Yahoo Messenger (Not)

He shared with us his experience of learning WPF: he treated WPF like Flash in the beginning, and found it hard to use until Microsoft Blend came up, and then he felt the right tools are there for the right people. According to Leon, Blend was developed on WPF for Vista, the first application that actually use WPF to develop. It really looks nice and easy to use.

The 3D performance of WPF is quite impressive: rendering 100+ 3D letters produced in real time @ >=30 fps

Lee then introduced to us Silverlight, the direct competitor for Adobe Flash, with a totally different underlying technology for Deviners (Microsoft Term: between Developer and Designer) and Wimestreamidists (People doing Window Media Streaming). Silveright has very good video streaming capability! You can check out the demos on Sliverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 has similar performance as Flash AS3, and it is believed that Silverlight 1.1 has faster running speed than Flash AS3 (*not confirmed though*).

Beau Amber has done a lot of work on Rich Media Applications before, using mainly Flash. He has built his company Metaliq based on Flash development. He shared with us that he was not keen to go for MIX2006 because he thought Microsoft was not listening, but after he went and gave his feedback, he found out that Microsoft actually listened to people’s feedback and adjusted their software for the developers! So he went for MIX2007 and presented in the keynote presentation about his baby: Top Banana

Track GPS data and map to a 3D skiing model

He motioned a long process of converting GPS data to XML, using a self written Binary2Text Converter ->Edit Text in Word->Save as CSV->Open in Excel->Convert to XML. If I were him, I would use .NET 2.0 do write a direct Binary2XML program.

When were listening how beautiful the program is, which includes a Vista Gadget, a 3D model algorithm to map your XML to 3D models and the ability to automagically resize the window without screwing the image, Mevlin Yuan took a photo of us watching attentively to the speaker Thanks Bro

Beau mentioned that some of the cool apps are hosted on Microsoft sever, so the bandwidth is paid for by Microsoft and they scale well thanks to live storage. And he went on talking about Microsoft Express Media Encoder Preview:

: You define a portion of the timeline, put down some makers to indicate some changes and add some effects. Click a button and wait for a short while. Walla, your video is encoded @ 512Kbps, put on a HTML page, with video controls and pictorial markers for yout to jump to any time you like. Check his blog here:

http://beaumix.spaces.live.com

Oh man, this is really cool, you can encode and put any content on the web page automagcially! It is interesting that Beau said they were transiting from Flash to Silverlight. I think Silverlight is going to penetrate the market because of its advance in technology and ease of use because of surrounding technology, though I am still waiting for my SilverBox to come online soon.

Just to mention, all the tools you see people use to develop these demos are not free (Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Expression Suite). You gotta buy it to feel the money put in worth every penny. Yet. there are something bothering me, iPhone does not support Silverlight yet, how Microsoft is responding to that? A updated Zune that does the phone?

Anyway, here is something fun from Melvin:

Just as I suspected… “Estee Teo” is a handbag brand. Estee Lauder; Estee Teo…. makes sense…

Talking about lift span of Silverlight across the different platforms., Nic said this to me:

“Sliverlight is like XBOX360. Microsoft is committed to build Silverlight as long as RIA development needs a plugin[for different platforms]“.

PS:

Live writer has a plugin for posting video using Silverlight.

They gave out quite some freebies! Window Vista Ultimate, XBOX360 Games and Microsoft Expression Web.

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