Learning’s from Remix 09 Australia – Azure, Blend and Silverlight

When I attended Remix last month I made some notes in the evening on what I learned that day:

Top Line:

• Silverlight is extremely rich in features that make create appealing user experiences quicker than before
• Much of the learning’s from other technologies such as Surface have been reused
• This has led to rapid appealing applications emerging and new cloud platforms options to assist

The Silverlight site has some great videos on what’s new in Silverlight 3.0

Azure:

• Azure service management tools demonstrated looked very appealing
• Eventing through Azure was possible
• Configuration for Azure was pretty good
• There are tools to load SQL data to the Cloud.

Such as taking the data from a SQL Server database and upload it in their Azure table storage account

Silverlight 3:

• Easing
• Behaviours
• Physics (example) (also see Physics Helper)
• Perspectives

Blend 3:

• Storyboard and animations have had a major overhaul - Hold, transition/ease and new brush types
• Visual State modeller and transitions are a major step forward in describing and modelling UI animations
• Out of Brower (OOB) and Save to File can be brought to life using behaviours - Silverlight project options enable OOB
• Assets and tab docking are now possible
• Blend 3 works with TFS

Keynote:

• Vissl – Amazon search tool
• Ninemsn Grazia (recordable and sharable navigation)
• Thought Sensor prototype – use of brain waves to track mood/expression and feedback to application (from ANU and many others)
• EMEU Card (card with authentication)
• Prototype to real AFL game analyser (point being that PoC’s are invariably very close to the real thing – and therefore worth doing)
• Grays Online ie8 Accelerators and Web Slices
• Lonely Planet – Surface Application to Silverlight portability

Other:

Sketchflow (experiment with ideas for dynamic user interaction)