Dave Bost

Last week, I had an opportunity to be attendee (other then speaker this time) at one of our Visual Studio 2008 launch events. This was no ordinary Microsoft launch event. I didn’t even have to leave my home office to attend. This particular launch event took place in the metaverse known as Second Life.

I was a little skeptical at the prospects of this type of event and how it would play out. After all, I didn’t want to see any flying male genitalia while I was sitting in on a discussion on Visual Studio 2008 web development features. I mustered up the gumption to try out this new medium and see how it would all go down. I will have to say, I was quite impressed.

I’ve logged on to Second Life a couple of times before to see what all the fuss was about. I never really made it past the introductory area where they teach you how to move around and interact with the environment. When I logged on for the launch event, I just typed in “Microsoft Launch” in the search area and it listed the exact location of where I needed to go. I selected the “Visual Studio Island” (Yes… we own an island in Second Life) and clicked “Transport” and it beemed me to where I needed to go.

There was a main lobby area where there were a number of volunteers offering people help of where to go. “The Visual Studio sessions are to your left…the SQL Server sessions are over there…and the Windows Server sessions are over here”. Each session area had its own auditorium with seats for attendees, a stage, and a big screen to present the slide decks on.

The day consisted of a full launch agenda with 4 sessions for each track. J Sawyer, another Developer Evangelist co-hort out of Houston, kicked off the Visual Studio track. J or “Elwyn Nightfire”, his Second Life persona, came flying into the stage (yes, flying… flying is a big part of moving around in Second Life and who doesn’t want to fly???) and through voice chat, delivered a great session on introducing Visual Studio 2008. The slides are apparently uploaded as image files into the Second Life area and J, as the presenter, had the control to advance the images/slides just as you would in a “normal” presentation.

The technical challenge was how could you show code and demos. Unfortunately, Second Life doesn’t have an option to stream in a desktop session. What the crafty virtual launch team came up with was to utilize Live Meeting for all the demo portions of the sessions. When it was time to do a demo, the presenter would send out the Live Meeting URL in the chat window where each attendee could fire up a Live Meeting session and watch the presenter walkthrough the demo steps in real time. The trick is to leave Second Life maximized in the background so the audio from the voice chat would still come through as Live Meeting was running in the foreground. This actually worked really well. Especially well if you had two monitors. One monitor for the Second Life “in world” experience, and the second monitor for the Live Meeting demos.

There were a few hiccups here and there, but all in all it was a great experience. Zain Naboulsi (Csharp Writer), our Developer Evangelist co-hort down in Dallas, has been leading the “Virtual” evangelism charge at Microsoft and is a true believer in these types of experiences. He has been pushing Second Life (and other metaverses) as a way to reach out to the large audiences that we can’t normally reach, all at a much lower cost than what we pay for live events such as our MSDN events. Zain also supports a user group that holds all of their meetings in Second Life. They are, of course, the Second Life .NET Developers User Group. I have yet to attend one of their meetings, but I would expect the experience is the same.

I have to say that I was impressed by this event and it really got me thinking about ways we can extend our evangelism reach beyond our typical audiences. What I liked about Second Life versus a typical webcast was the interaction. You could voice chat or text chat with all of the other attendees. This truly enhanced the experience. It was an opportunity to hold discussions, through voice chat or text chat, among the attendees that you just can’t do through something like a typical MSDN webcast.

I’m in the process of trying to plan an in-person hands-on lab road show. I was trying to think of a way that I could utilize Second Life to reach a larger audience. With Second Life, I could offer up these same instructor-led lab experience for individuals who aren’t located in the cities I plan to hold these “real life” events in. Sure, I could provide all of the materials for you to do the labs yourself, but you miss out in that interactivity with other people. Learning as part of a group is typically more beneficial than trying to fight through it yourself.

What do you think? Would you attend something like this? I would still have to figure out the technical details, but I’m sure its possible.

The one thing about this “experience” is that there is certainly a ramp up time to get used to interacting and moving around in Second Life. Once you get past those little details, that opportunities seem to be endless. Oh, and if you find yourself in Second Life sometime, look for “Davcor Hax”. That’s me.

Photos from the event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26049813@N05/show/

This week, I’m lined up to deliver a couple of MSDN webcasts: Introduction to Silverlight and Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX. Both of these sessions are billed as 100-level which could prove to be quite challenging. I’m used to the 300-400 level discussions where we can get down and dirty with the code. 100-level discussions are more overview than anything. Introduce the technology, provide the high-level points and point your attendees to the resources they need to continue on their quest for knowledge.

The Silverlight webcast will prove even *more* challenging as the glitz & glamour of Silverlight won’t show through as ideally as one would hope on a webcast stream. What I’ll most likely do is have the attendees follow along on some publicly available sites while I point out some features.

Join me… will you?

Introduction to Silverlight
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008, 12:00PM CST/10:00AM PST

Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX
Friday, April 11th, 2008, 11:00AM CST/9:00AM PST

Not only have we seen a number of Visual Studio launch events taking place across the region of late (and more to come!), but we have a number of community-led events popping up like crab grass in the summertime.

This weekend (April 5th) is the 6th annual (or is it 7th now? I can’t keep ‘em straight anymore) Deeper in .NET 2008 event in the land of Arthur Fonzarelli and the Happy Days gang. Scott and the Wisconsin .NET Users Group always do a great job in putting on a world-class event, and this year is no different. For DiDN 2008, they pulled out all the jobs by getting a couple of folks from the mothership in Redmond, Scott Wisniewski (Visual Basic team) and Charlie Calvert (C# team). DiDN 2008 also welcomes Jason Beres to walk us through the ins/outs of Silverlight 2, along with the always entertaining Mark Miller and Richard Campbell of .NET Rocks and Mondays fame.

Larry and I will be there trying to squeeze in as many Thirsty Developer interviews as we can muster up. If you’d like to join in the fun, track us down and we’ll roll the mics.

Also coming up on the horizon on April 26th is the first Indianapolis Code Camp. They have over 24 sessions on the schedule ranging from topics on Agile development practices, WCF, WPF, Team System, ASP.NET practices, Test Driven Development (TDD), ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight. That’s a full day with a lot of great sessions. And these sessions aren’t being delivered by any marketing drones. This is a Code Camp afterall. These are your peers. Developer discussions by Developers for Developers. Nix the slideware and show me the code!

By: Long Zheng

Scott Guthrie was…er…juggling the keynote at MIX’08 this year. You could say he was head ringmaster. As opposed to Ray Ozzie kicking MIX off with a short intro into his vision of cloud-based computing, ScottGu was leading us through the majority of keynote festivities. Scott gave up the stage for a brief moment to Dean Hachamovitch, to give us all an update on IE8 and the direction it is headed in. When the stage was handed back to ScottGu, things really got rockin’. Including an announcement that the Silverlight plug-in is averaging 1.5 Million downloads per day! Not a bad start.

Most of the keynote centered around the roadmap and feature list for Silverlight 2 (SL2). It was announced at MIX that Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download and comes with a go-live license for early adopters. Some of the great new features of Silverlight 2 include:

• Adaptive Streaming; Silverlight can analyze the available bandwidth between client and server and adjust accordingly to provide an acceptable user experience while streaming video.
• Silverlight Advertisement Templates for Visual Studio; a project wizard to help define advertisement type, size, placement, etc.
• Rich UI Framework - CONTROLS!; Calendar, Button, Slider, CheckBox, DataGrid, etc. all with Layout management, Resize, etc.
• Multi-language support
• Data-binding support
• Rich Skinning, Style and Animation
• Robust Network support; Socket support (who doesn’t love sockets???)
• Integrated Data support; LINQ support and local data cache
• Two words - Deep Zoom

The keynote included a number of customer examples including an amazing showcase by NBC and the Olympics. They are really going to be putting Silverlight through it’s paces. Over 2200 hours of live footage that will all eventually be available for on demand viewing. From there, you can edit the clips and share them with your friends. They will collect all of the highlights and share them with the community of viewers from around the world. You are put in control of what coverage you’d like to see at the Olympics. Pretty amazing!

Hard Rock teamed up with Vertigo Software to build Memorabilia 2.0 that uses the new Deep Zoom technology built into Silverlight 2. Deep Zoom is the culmination of the Sea Dragon project that came out of Windows Live Labs. It allows you to scale in and out of high-res images, only using the bandwidth it needs to show the particular part of the image you are viewing. In Hard Rock’s case, they took a number of high-res images of some of their memorabilia collection, stitched them together and created a 2-billion pixel image that you can interact with. You can also apply metadata to the image to provide a customized view, for example sorting based on musical era, genre, alphabetical based on band name, etc. The best thing about this demo is the fact that you can interact with it right now - it’s live! I can’t wait to see what other usage scenarios come up for this technology.

Other demos included AOL showcasing how they rewrote their entire AOL Mail client in Silverlight. This was all about increasing performance over their HTML/AJAX implementation and providing a better user experience for the customer. They succeeded.

Both Cirque du Soleil and Aston Martin showcased how they are using WPF technology for their line-of-business applications.

There were also some server-side announcements as well. The new Windows Media Services 2008 brings 3x scalability to media hosting in IIS7 all for the low-low cost of - FREE! Also with the IIS7 Media Pack, web server administrators have control over how many bits they send over the wire with Bit-rate throttling built-in.

Not that this wasn’t enough, but we also learned of the future Silverlight on Mobile plans. We were treated to some early news just prior to MIX when it announced that Nokia would be supporting Silverlight on its S60, Series 40 phones and Internet tablets. The plans are to release a developer CTP for Silverlight for Mobile in the 2nd quarter of 2008. This is targeting Silverlight 1.0 at this time. There was no word on Silvelright 2 for Mobile plans.

All in all, a great keynote. But why are you reading this? You should be watching the whole thing online, through Silverlight of course, at http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=KYN0801.

By Long Zheng

I had the fortune to attend the MIX conference last week. Although my notes are little late (more on that later), I wanted to get them up here soon enough for your reading enjoyment.

Dean Hachamovitch took the stage at MIX to finally layout the plans for the next release of Internet Explorer - IE8. Here are a few quick notes that I was able to capture while sitting in an overflow room with about 200-300 other Microsoft employees.

IE 8 Beta 1 is available now - this is a build release purely for developers and web designers. Dean said they focused on security for IE7. With IE8 the focus moves to the developer and the semantic web. Dean highlighted several points:

• IE 8 is targeting CSS 2.1 compliance. IE has been knocked for its CSS implementations in the past. Most of that was due to either implementations before a standard existed or the ambiguity that surrounds the CSS specification. Microsoft feels that CSS 2.1 is less ambiguous and will work with the developer community and the standards committees to make interpretation is inline.
• CSS Certification - Microsoft is contributing over 700 test cases to the CSS working group. These test cases are available to the open community as well.
• Performance - huge performance increases since IE7. Coming closer inline with other recently released browsers. There is more work to do in this area before IE8 ships.
• HTML5 - start of support for HTML5, deeper integration between the browser and AJAX, and making web pages network aware.
• Developer Tools - dev tools integration in the browser, including debugging support. One of the interesting features here is the dynamic page analysis in which the dev tools will report back the HTML as it stands in memory. Think of how AJAX calls may modify the DOM during runtime. Dynamic analysis will report back what’s the true state of the DOM, not what was first loaded from the initial server request. Very cool!
• Activities - smart tags for the web? Highlight an address and a context pops up that links you to Live Maps. Highlight a product name and link to an Ebay auction for that item. This is all done through minimal XML markup within the HTML elements themselves.
• WebSlices - “subscribe” to a portion of web content on a page. Such as an Ebay auction watch window, your friends status in Facebook, the current weather listing on Weather.com, etc. Once again, minimal XML markup within the HTML elements defines a web slice.