Live Blogging at MIX09 – Keynote Diary

This morning I am at the keynote of MIX09 getting ready to listen to Scott Gu and the crew to see the latest and greatest announcements. It will be nice to finally e able to talk about some of the awesome stuff they are producing. I’m sitting with Dave Campbell of www.Silverlightcream.com, Jay Kimble of Tampa UX, Pete Brown, Corey Schuman,Page Brooks, Bryant Likes, Frank LaVigne and many other Silverlight stars in the front row. I’ll be live blogging the keynote as I go, so keep refreshing the post as the keynote unfolds to unlock all of the goodies.

You can also watch me and follow me on Twitter @john_papa …

DISCLAIMER: These are my raw notes as interpreted from the speakers at the keynote of MIX09. 

I will jot several notes in the timelines below, but will highlight the ones I find most intriguing. be sure to check out my post on photos from MIX09.

Keynote timeline:

9:00am – Bill Buxton jokes that we could all be dentists or accountants … but how much cooler is it that we do what we do :)

9:12am – Bill Buxton discusses state transition diagrams and the importance of design

9:21am – First mention of the word “Microsoft”. The code is important but UX design is key.

9:25am – Points out the shortest demo ever!

9:26am - Links Kevin Bacon to Frankenstein to Silverlight in 6 degrees of separation

9:28am – Awesome “where in the world is Scott Gu” video. Scott Gu getting his hair done, disco dancing, getting a skull tattoo, 7 red polo shirts being sent to the Gu, Gu using a chain saw in the men’s room, doing a cola commercial, at a wedding, screaming female Scott Gu groupies, writing code in his super hero outfit, and finally the rock music while he walks out in his red polo. You gotta see the video, soon to be online on demand on the MIX web site.

9:33am – Gu discusses Expression Web 3 and Erik Saltwell to introduce and demo Expression Web 3.

9:34am – Saltwell demos super preview feature. Shows split screen of HTML and preview of the page as it would be in FireFox. Then demos that super preview also has buttons to instantly show how the page will look in FireFox, Safari, IE 6, IE 8, and more. Very cool!

9:35am – Shows that super preview can talk to the browser locally installed, but if you don’t have the browser installed it looks in the cloud to find the browser so you can test in those browsers too. This is great … so we don’t have to have the browser installed to test web pages!

9:38am – SuperPreview version will be available today, free according to Gu.

9:40am – MVC framework discussion begins … full control over HTML markup, SEO friendly URL, TDD … it is shipping now.

9:41am – ASP.NET 4:  web forms, MVC, AJAX improvements, distributed caching engine (Velocity)

9:42am – VS 2010: code focused improvements, jscript and AJAX scripting support improvements, jQuery tooling, SharePoint authoring support, different versions of config files (to support testing, staging, dev, production) and more awesome stuff coming soon.

9:43am – 8 web server extension updates will be announced this week, for free, and integrate within the admin tool for IIS

9:44am – Web Platform Installer (WebPI) installs the latest web platform tools, server, database, and framework. Its free. check it out today at www.microsoft.com/web 

9:47am – WebPI installer is a 1MB download file. It inspects your PC and determines what releases you do not have. All on 1 screen we can find all the technologies … no need to go to separate web pages anymore to find them all. Very cool indeed for a guy like me who loathes the time investment in the install experience.

(BTW … These chairs are not comfortable … very narrow too)

9:51am – Gu discusses Azure Services Platform … on track for commercial release later this year. Some new features they are working on … Fast CGI support (enabling of PHP apps, too), SQL Data Services (relational database support and full ADO.NET support), more .NET services.

9:53am – BizSpark – Rehash of BizSpark program. Designed to help entrepreneurs access to Microsoft software. Offers marketing, hosting options, and all sorts of good things for companies for FREE.

9:54am – Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood (creators of the awesome www.Stackoverflow.com). Awesome web site with great technology solutions. If you hae not used this, you really should. Peple post technology questions and you can answer them. The answers can be voted on, so the better ones float to the top. If the answers get stale or outdated, its like a wiki .. .so you can edit the answers and keep it up to date. (as explained by Atwood and Spolsky)

9:56am – www.stackoverflow.com was built with .NET in just a few months.  Great example of .NET in the wild.

10:10am – Gu introduces  Silverlight 3! 350,000,000 installations in the world. 300,000 designers in the world, 200+ partners that contribute to the ecosystem, 200+ web sites and apps that use it at Microsoft, new telescope app introduced today so you can watch the stars (built with Silverlight). 10,000+ sites use Silverlight around the world (CBS, Toyota, MTV, NBC, NetFlix, etc)

10:03am - Kevin McEntee of NetFlix comes out to discuss the 12,000 movies and TV shows they stream today with Silverlight. They started a year ago looking to find a way to get streaming video to the Mac. They could not use FireFox either. Roughly 20% of their users could not watch streamed video … they chose Silverlight to tackle this.

10:09am – McEntee claims they cut their rebuffer rate in half with Silverlight. Silverlight enables them to get updates and improvements without having to reinstall software for updates. he claims they update just about every 2 weeks, with 0 user involvement due to Silverlight. Started out as a Mac player and FireFox option … but they are realizing more potential (as mentioned above) plus XBOX integration. NetFlix is looking forward to features in Silverlight 3: GPU support for scaling and stretching video, wide range of processors at lower price points to support video streaming,too. Says NetFlix is very happy with Silverlight.

10;12am – NetFlix is demoing the adaptive streaming. Starts at 500kb streaming bit rate and jumps up to 1000 and 1500 as the buffer is filled.

10:13am – Gu gets applause for Silverlight 3’s GPU hardware acceleration (works on Mac too). Adding codec support for AAC, H.264, MPEG-5. Raw bitstream audio/video API. Improved logging too.

10:14am – Gu discusses IIS Media Services … live smooth streaming, on demand smooth streaming, edge caching, web playlists, bit rate throttling, advanced logging

10:18am – Gu shows Expression Encoder 2  and opens a video. Shows how to target the IIS server and encode the video at a smooth streaming format with selected video bit rates. Shows one of the available video players you can use. Stats are available in the player for bit rate, showing the bit rate changes … you can also change bit rate o n demand to test it. Very slick. Shows awesome soccer video at 3mb streaming rate … gotta love the soccer plug by Gu). Ability to go back and watch recorded video then press a “Live” button to see the live stream again.

10:22am – Perkins Miller of NBC comes out to discuss Silverlight’s role in the Beijing Olympics. 50 million unique visitors, 70 million clips over 7 days of time, some cool stats. Miller claims it was a “Phenomenal  partnership”.

10:24am - Miller announces that Silverlight will be used for the next 2010 Olympics in Vancouver Canada streamed fully in HD! Full 720p adaptive streamed event. Wow, very cool! We’ll get the DVR experience to pause live stream and use slow motion to watch a skier (for example) go slow mo online to land a jump. metadata overlays will be used to include information in the videos to show things like who the athletes are.

10:27am – Gu discusses RIA in Silverlight 3. Upping the ante with GPU acceleration, perspective 3D, bitmap and pixel shader API. Gu’s first big demo … gratuitous graphics … wiggling bouncing, dancing video with ripple, magnification, and other cool effects. This works for video, images, or any control. (I can see it now, someone will make this the new “HTML blink:” feature … LOL)

10:30am – Deep linking and navigation for Silverlight 3 (fantastic!!!). Improved SEO experience with all major search engines. Improved text quality (clear type support was mentioned!), multi-touch support, 100+ controls available.

10:34am – The folks at Vertigo and Bondi come on stage for a demo with Deep Zoom. Shows a demo with the contents of the entire issue of a Rolling Stone magazine. Search features, highlights, awesome demo! Uses multi-touch to zoom and navigate. Announces every playboy issue (www.playboyarchive.com) will use this to the applause of the crowd. LOL

10:41am – Gu discuses Expression Blend 3 is discussed. It has SketchFlow, PhotoShop import features, behaviors, designing with data, source code control, XAML, C# and VB intellisense. Yes, I repeat, intellisense is coming!

10:44am – Shows a great demo of Microsoft sidewinder developed with Blend 3 and Silverlight 3 using SketchFlow.See photos here for some samples.

10:49am – I am blown away by the Ui design of sidewinder and the features of SketchFlow. Seems very intuitive. It even creates documentation from the work you do. includes text, notes, and screen shots in a laid out TOC format. Awesome!

10:58am – SketchFlow demo in Expression Blend 3 … you gotta see this. Absolutely blown away, am I!

11:00am – Gu discusses new features such as: Data binding improvements, validation error templates, server data push improvements, binary XML networking support, multi-tier REST data support. Loving this stuff … its my niche!

11:03am – Silverlight for business applications: Demo of RIA Services (Alexandria) with Silverlight. I’ll blog more about this later, but man, I’ve been dying to write about this!

(Scott Gu is speeding up a bit … I’m almost out of battery too!)

11:05am – Gu’s demo shows how very little code we need to hook a fully data bound app up in Silverlight using RIA Services. Shows data bound datagrid bound to a char. Very slick business demo. This stuff tracks dirty data and does validation.

11:07am – Silverlight 3 runs out of the browser, Yes!!! My favorite feature, tied with RIA Services. Out of browser scenarios: edtend media experiences, companion applications for your web site, lightweight data snacking applications.

11:08am – Out of browser (OOB) apps will run in a sandbox, so security is on the forefront of their minds. Built in auto update support for OOB. Built in offline awareness. Events exist for notifications of offline and online changes.

11:11am – KEXP (music radio station in Seattle) demo of OOB application experience with Silverlight 3.

11:20am – Silverlight 3 is actually 40k smaller than the download for Silverlight 2!

11:21am – Silverlight 3 beta is available for download today. includes preview of expression Blend 3 for free, tools for VS 2008, too.

That’s it for the keynote, thanks for reading!