Black Orange – Peter Du’s Blog

Thanks to Nic Fillingham, I am able to attend REMIX 2007, a web developer, designer and decision makers’ conference.

I went straight into the breakout tracks, you can find the information about the Keynote and opening from Jiin Joo’s blog posts.

As I was a fan of Sliverlight because of all the cool demos I saw the other day, I first joined the Silverlight development sessions.

Sliverlight 1.0 uses Silverlight ActiveX 1.0 plugin and manipulate that using Javascript and XAML. The Quick Start kit is found on Silverlight.net. Well, a simple Javascript from Microsoft file called SilverLight.js

Silverlight has windows-less mode with a change of simple parameter that is passed to the object. As Silverlight 1.0 was produced for a direct competition with Flash, most of the time you do not need Visual Studio to program, but rather solid Javascript and XMAL skills.

Extensible Application Markup Language (XMAL) is a declarative XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML. XAML syntax focuses upon defining the UI (user interface) for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is therefore separate from the application code behind it.

Just a side note, the room is filled with ASP.NET developers, let’s hope all of them are Microsoft Fan, and a few people do J2EE development, and even fewer does Python and Ruby on Rails programming. There are real gurus among source developers – they develop real good programs. Yet for a platform like Microsoft .NET, because of its extensive documentation and online support built by Microsoft MVPs, it is really easy to pick up and develop some interesting program on top of it.

Silverlight is still under heavy development, the most current version is 1.1 alpha, with C# support. But for this conference, they are talking about Silverlight 1.0 beta, the more mature version from the suffix. The emphasis they put in the conference is on design, so the speaker spent a great deal of time talking about Canvas and Brushes. For those of us who like to program a picture, Silverlight supports various type of brushes, including gradient brush, picture brush and shape brushes. The feeling of drawing using Silverlight is like composing a picture in illustration using different layers.

The speaker for that Silverlight session is Laurence Moroney, you can find more information on his blog.

We went on to talking about the video capability in Silverlight. The very first thing stuck in my mind is the word “DRM”: Laurence told us how good Silverlight support video streaming, you can even play “DRM” video through that, just use a simple tag<MediaElement>. I am not sure how I like that, though the mp3 player I have now supports DRM. But the most troubling thing is they only supports windows media player file. Which means I will have a lot of difficult in the video conversion on my Linux Box. Which reminds me that Microsoft might be coming up with a ZunePhone to support all these fun things for mobile devices. While I was fascinated about the easiness of using the video streaming capability, like locating a particular time in the video using Video.seconds.play = 5, I realized from the speaker, the video must be loaded until that seconds for you to use the property. That translates into no support for the real streaming like RSTP yet, but they are going to add MMS streaming support in version 1.1

For programmers out there, Silverlight 1.0 beta is DOM compatible, you can program the way you use to do in the web page. However, it does not support any CSS extension directly yet, which is not too bad an idea, as we do not want to see a new standard for CSS again. Creative solutions to this would be reading CSS using Javascript and operate on the DOM using the information through Invocation like SetValue() and GetValue()

Laurence:

Performance optimization is last thing Microsoft does.

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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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This was the screen saver they used to attracted my attention, and it was awesome:

You can down load the screensaver here

In the afternoon I went over to the business track titled THE POWER OF DIGITAL MEDIA. The speech was based on the idea that with the invention of technology that enables people to digest information electronically, the advertising scheme of personalization and the underlying software platform will emerge to become main revenue generator for business.

The speaker is Chris Schaumann. He is Country Sales Manager in Singapore of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. And I think that’s the reason I never find his talk boring comparing to some pure technical track I attended later.

I jotted down a few things he talked about and with my reviews of them following right after them.

Consumers are taking control, being more sophisticated, they choose what they want to see.

Starhub is doing trail on TiVO in Singapore, the result? We skip the Ads. and watch the program encored. This reminds me of the commercial I watched at the end of TED talk, produced by BWM. That’s awesome.

Blogs have changed people’s ideas of New Information.

Only 2% of 30% of the people in Singapore spends time on advertising.

We need to utilize the radical change brought by Internet to work on the information feeding to us.

Take a look at bringtheloveback.com where Microsoft wants to change the image of New online Advertising.

Steve Ballmer has talked about Windows Before, Developer followed. And a year ago, Steve Ballmer talks about Advertising, Advertising and Advertising!

- Find the Video on Youtube -

The market of software and advertising are converging, the overlap of these two markets are producing a huge market for software platform. Windows is claiming to be a window platform and services provider.

XBox360 Server enables cross platform game: XBOX360 vs PC

Massive InGame advertising: Streaming Ads according to your profile and put in the game – Oh, well we know who you are! That’s really nice ads.

25 Year Old Adults are the main target of these Ads. I think more vibrant ads would attract people’s attention: example I see a wine ads, and estee see a diet coke.

5 Years down the road, WCG with games when virtual reality become true, we see the trend converging of real and virtual advertising.

Microsoft in Concert: Streaming live/archives of the concert.

On 07/07/07 Live Earth Concert -> You can watch the concert live through MSN

Al Gore is coming to Singapore this August, Microsoft is supporting that.

Encarta Bot is something interesting add this encarta@botmetro.net, thanks to Jiin Joo

Nike is cool! Nike Kimewaza