Early Day 2 Mix 07
Rob and I were out late last night, in bed by 11:30! But when you consider we are East Coast guys that is pretty late. We enjoyed dinner with Mark Dunn, a Regional Director from Atlanta and former co-host of the popular DotNetRocks Podcast. That was a great experience and I got to pick his brain a bit about things going on in Atlanta, DotNetRocks and managing a Code Camp. He was excited about the upcoming CodeCampRDU, June 23 at the Raleigh ECPI campus, and committed to presenting.
Yesterday was a whirlwind of a day as we ran into friends, and made more acquaintances. We started the day at breakfast and met some guys from a computer based training company in Oregon and some independent developers from St. Louis. I enjoyed talking to those guys because I spent some time in St. Louis in Jr. High and still love the Cardinals. We followed that up waiting for the keynote and lounging by playing Xbox and Blogging.
The keynote was pretty good, nothing too earth shattering, or was it just that the big announcements were some of the worst kept secrets the past few months. The big announcement was the release of Silverlight 1.1 and the cross-platform support for the MAC. This is really key to Silverlight being adopted and usefulness on the Internet. The real big thing really was with the release of Silverlight on the MAC was the fact it carries a ‘Full Sub-Set’ (Rob and I were joking about the irony of that statement last night) of the .NET CLR. So basically with Silverlight we can now develop an application and know it will run on both PC and MAC. I really look for this release to really be a huge step and maybe a new paradigm for the way we think about building user facing applications. It think Silverlight finally brings the ability for us to build an application and have it execute in a browser as a real application. It eliminates the need for a lot of complicated and often buggy cross-browser JavaScript and CSS. The only problem I see is the ability for search engines to index the content. Stay tuned for more, I may chat with the Live.com reps while I am here.
As far as the sessions I attended yesterday, the Virtual Earth was sort of disappointing because it was really just a marketing pitch of things I already knew. The next session was a Silverlight for designers, but was really nothing more than a recap of the morning Keynote. Finally I went to Joe Stegman’s Silverlight for Developers talk. It was pretty good. It was based on the Silverlight 1.0 beta, which has been out, but requires some JavaScript to work in the browser. That is the big difference between the 1.1 announced yesterday and the existing Silverlight.
So who did I meet or run into yesterday, here is a list off the top of my head, Jeff Attwood, Rod Paddock, Scott Hanselman, Todd Fine, Jeff Prosise, Mark Dunn, Peter Ludauti and Brad Abrams just to name a few. I had some great conversations with everyone and look forward to many more today and tomorrow. Today will be some major Silverlight action for me.