Silverlight

The Day 1 keynote started with Silverlight and finished with the first complete announcement Windows Phone and its development environment, as well as where you can download  all the goodies to get started immediately.

You should watch it if: You want to get the “feel” of this year’s MIX conference, you’re new to developing for the Microsoft platform (or haven’t done so in a long time) or if you’re a completist.

This was the very first breakout session following MIX10’s Day 1 keynote. In it, Joe Belfiore, Corporate VP Windows Phone, covers the Windows Phone 7 strategy and philosophy, runs through a lot of demos (which make up the lion’s share of the session) and talks about the hardware spec and the partners who will build the phones.

You should watch it if: You haven’t read any of the news about Windows Phone 7 prior to MIX, you’ve never seen the Windows Phone 7 user interface or applications in action, or you’re a business or technical decision-maker wondering wondering if your company should build apps for Windows Phone 7.

It’s my main man, Charlie Kindel, PGPMWPAPDE (Partner Group Program Manager for the Windows Phone Application Platform and Developer Experience) giving us the “100-level” overview of what’s available for developers who want to build Windows Phone apps.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer who wants a high-level overview of Windows Phone 7 development or if you’re a technical decision-maker wondering if your company should build apps for Windows Phone 7.

Albert Shum (“That Dude” behind the design of Windows Phone 7), Michael Smuga (Studio Director) and Chad Roberts (UX Design Lead) talk about the “design language” of Windows Phone 7, which comprises its design principles, metaphors, conventions, “look and feel” and target audience as well as how to design apps that have their own identity and still “speak” Windows Phone 7’s design language.

You should watch it if: You’re a designer, information architect or user experience person who wants to build Windows Phone 7 apps, or if you want a clearer idea of the philosophies behind Windows Phone 7’s user interface and design, direct from the people responsible for creating it.

Istvan Cseri, who holds the position of Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and now works with the Windows Phone team, provides a closer look at the technological features of Windows Phone 7. He covers the hardware foundation, the underlying operating system, the application model, the page-based UI model and cloud integration services. 

You should watch it if: You’re a developer or developer manager who wants to build apps for Windows 7 and wants to know more about the platform.

You should watch it if: You’re planning on making some extra spending money (or even paying the rent/mortgage) with Windows Phone apps and are curious as to how Windows Phone Marketplace works.

This one’s not about building “native” Windows Phone apps with Silverlight or XNA, but for that third mobile platform: the web. Joe Marini, Principal Program Manager for Windows Phone, explains the web’s mobile context and why it’s different, walks through do’s and don’t for building usable, engaging and rich mobile web sites and the general principles of designing and developing for the platform that fits in your pocket.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer or designer who wants to build websites that work well for mobile devices (and yes, that includes Windows Phone).

Christian Schormann and Pete Blois of the Expression Blend team talk about the upcoming version of our tool for building and designing user workflows, interfaces and experiences. There are 4 major demos: an introduction to Blend for Windows Phone, the “Ready for Business” capabilities of Blend 4 and Silverlight 4, the creative side of Blend and its new take on layout, game design for Windows Phone with Blend.

You should watch it if: You’re new to Expression Blend, you’re a developer or designer planning to build Silverlight applications for Windows Phone, you’re an interaction designer wondering about Sketchflow, or you’ve asked the question “Why Blend? Doesn’t Visual Studio already come with an interface designer?”

This presentation was scheduled just before the Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight series for those developers who want to build apps for Windows Phone, but have never built a Silverlight application before. Think of it as “Silverlight 101”. It’s presented by Silverlight Program Manager Shawn Oster, who like me, spent some time away from .NET in the world of PHP and Ruby on Rails before joining Microsoft. Shawn will walk through building user interfaces in Silverlight using both Visual Studio and Expression Blend and how you can use the same code for both Windows Phone and the web.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer or designer planning on building apps for Windows Phone 7 but have never touched Silverlight before.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer or designer who’s familiar with Silverlight and want to use it to build Windows Phone apps.

Pete Torr, Program Manager for Windows Phone, continues where Mike Harsh left off in part 1 by covering application structure, controls and how to apply themes to them and how to make use of connected services in Silverlight on Windows Phone 7.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer or designer who’s familiar with Silverlight, want to use it to build Windows Phone apps and have seen Part 1 (see above).

Jeff Wilcox, Senior Software Development Engineer and the guy hwo wrote the unit testing framework for Silverlight, provides a quick introduction to unit testing (yes, lots of people still don’t do it) and leaps into the new Silverlight unit testing framework, which works on both your development machine and right on the hardware phone (once it comes out).

You should watch it if: You’re a developer who plans to build Windows Phone applications with Silverlight and you want to do the right thing and incorporate unit testing into your application development process.

Seema Ramchandani has an interesting job title – it’s “Silverlight Performance and Graphics for Windows Phone 7 Series”. In this talk, she talks about how to get the most performance out of you Silverlight-based Windows Phone apps, from “less is more”, to taking advantage of the render thread and GPU and going easy on the UI thread, to other optimization tricks.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer who plans to build snappy, responsive Silverlight applications for Windows Phone.

This one’s presented by Cullen Waters of the Advanced Technology Group, who works on the Xbox 360. This presentation covers XNA Game Studio 4.0, the new free-as-in-beer Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone emulator and his favourite tools for game development (and how you can use them for building Windows Phone games).

You should watch it if: You’re a developer planning to build games for Windows Phone using XNA, you’re familiar with game development with XNA and you’re trying to squeeze as much performance out of your games as possible.

Michael Klucher, Lead Program Manager, provides a high-level overview of the latest version of Microsoft’s game development framework and toolset, XNA, which supports building games for Windows, Xbox 360 and now, Windows Phone.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer planning to build games for Windows Phone using XNA, and you’re new to game development with XNA.

Shawn Hargreaves has been an XNA go-to guy since the XNA’s start, and in this session, he talks about bringing the Xbox 360 3D gaming experience to Windows Phone, how you can get blazing performance out of a managed language like C#, and all sorts of ways you can get the most performance out of XNA.

You should watch it if: You’re a developer planning to build games for Windows Phone using XNA, you’re familiar with 3D game development with XNA, you’re trying to squeeze as much performance out of your games as possible, or you’re interesting in what makes C# and .NET so blazingly fast despite the fact it’s not truly compiled.