MIX09 – Keynote Presentation

Arrived late to keynote. Full house, standing room only.

Launching this week:

Web Platform Installer – Install your grid apps automatically. Both MS Stack and open source components like PHP. Looks slick, free to download from the MS site. Colloquially called Web PI.
Commerce Server 2009
Azure Services Platform. Now includes FastCGI support (yay for PHP). SQL support extended to Hibernate and other data services. Still in preview, commercial release expect later this year.
GoDaddy and GoGrid are now Bizspark network partners
Joel Spolsky/Jeff Atwood talking about stackoverflow.com (online help for programmers), a better search engine to solve programming problems. Votes for answers. Its a WIKI so people can improve the answers. Its built in .NET. Got great performance. UI is designed around the concept of search. Supports OpenID. URLs are clean. Optimise by denormalising the database, 64 bit architecture. Reputation system for users. They used Bizspark to keep costs zero. We did it because it was a neat “hack”. Its not a .NET ghetto.
Silverlight. Silverlight 3 is the latest incarnation. 300,000 users. 200 partners. New MS Telescope and Virtual Earth apps launching today. Netflix streaming 12000 shows via Silverlight. Single player works on all platforms. Installers are evil. 20% of users won’t install/can’t install. Content protection baked in. Great platform for video. We can update the player transparently. SL3 GPU support (ability to seamlessly scale video). New Codecs (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4).Raw biststream Audio/Video API. Better media analytics.
IIS Media Services – Free streaming server. On demand smooth streaming. Bit rate throttling. No additional products required. Edge caching. Expression Encoder for encoding. Auto archive. Web Platform Installer will install it.
NBC’s Experience wtuh Silverlight at Bejing 2008 Olympics. 50m visitors, 1.3bn page views, 10m hours of video. 5000 clips every day. Largest digital video event ever. People who used the web watched twice as much TV online. A higher quality experience leads to better audiences watching more video. Vancouver Winter Olympics 2010 will have rewind, superslow replay all in HD. Meta data overlays (all the juicy stats). Real time feeds of most popular content. Live ad insertion (ugh!).
Rich Internet Applications. Perspective 3D. Bitmap and Pixel API. Pixel Shader effects. Deep Zoom improvements. Effects App. Nice demo of capabilities. Deep linking and navigation. SEO that works with all search engines. Page framework (back and forward buttons work). Better text quality (via cleartype). Multi-touch support. Lots more controls via third parties. Library caching via separate downloads.
Expression Blend 3. Sketchflow, layout your workflow screen by screen, very slick. Prototypes look like prototypes they use wiggly line. Sketchflow Player allows client interaction without needing full Expression Blend App. Player allows the user to enter feedback via text feedback or drawing. Export to Word to create a full document about your website, including screen shots, nice. Behaviours, add interactivity to yout app without writing code. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop support. Demo makes stuff look very easy, but there is actually a lot going on that presumes a detailed knowledge of the application.
Eclipse Support for Silverlight on the Mac (via third party).
SAP Netweaver support for Silverlight (in future release).
Silverlight outside the browser (just like AIR). Sandboxed environment. Auto update support. Offline awareness. Integration with underlying operating system. 5MB download. 40k smaller than sliverlight 2.
Silverlight 3 will ship later this year. Beta available today.