Nothing good can come from this. Here are Scott Hanselman, Miguel de Icaza and Phil Haack, hanging out right by the Channel 9 Live soundstage at the MIX conference, working away on something so very wrong that Scott can’t conceal the guilty look on his face.
The Channel 9 soundstage is where they’re holding interviews all through the day at MIX – tune in to live.visitmix.com to see them!
Pictured above is our very own Senior Developer Evangelist John Bristowe, making final preparations during the last few moments before he began his MIX11 session this afternoon: Adding the Awesomesauce Flavor with Internet Explorer 9 Pinned Sites. In this session he showed how you can make your own sites pinnable for IE9 (and 10) and why you’d want to do it: increased return visits!
If you weren’t at MIX, fret not: in about 24 hours, you’ll be able to catch the video of John’s presentation on his session’s page.
Don’t forget to mark September 13th through 16th, 2011 in your calendar: it’s when the next major Microsoft developer conference takes place. Stay tuned for more details.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection..
First, allow me to offer a graphic representation of today’s keynote at the MIX conference:
It was that nice. Great announcements, great demos, great flow and wonderful surprises – everything a technology keynote should be. If you missed the live stream, check back at the MIX conference site in 24 hours and watch the recording. You won’t be disappointed.
I’ve got to run and go catch today’s Windows Phone dev sessions, so this blog entry will have to be a quick one, covering some of the announcements and things shown at today’s MIX11 keynote, and it covers only the Windows Phone stuff. I’ll post more later, but in the meantime, here’s a quick taste!
One of the most annoying things about the current state of Windows Phone 7 development is that there are certain things that are just not doable in the emulator because computers lack the necessary sensors. (I like to joke that modern urinals are more aware of your presence than modern desktop and laptop computers.) If you want to test apps that make use of the accelerometer or GPS, you either have to deploy to a device or use cumbersome workarounds. Not with the next version of the dev tools!
Want to test your tilt-driven app in the emulator? No problem using the upcoming dev tools. There’s a window pane that will let you rotate a 3-D “virtual phone” (pictured above), and those simulated pitches, rolls and yaws get sent to the emulator, making it as if you were tilting a real phone. Better still, there’s a tilt recording facility so you can create a library of tilt motions to use in repeated testing as you build your app. A very nice touch.
There is a location emulator facility for Windows Phone, but it’s a little on the cumbersome side. You won’t need it once the next version of the dev tools comes out, thanks to the built-in location emulator (pictured above), which lets you specify a location with lat and long or more simply, by clicking on a Bing Map. As with the tilt emulator, it sends the location data to the phone emulator, and it’s as if you relocated the phone to a specific place.
The folks on the Windows Phone team have been hard at work adding all sorts of functionality to Windows Phone, and you’ll see it in the next version of the dev tools. The slide shown in the photo above shows some of the goodies that are coming your way soon, and they include:
With mobile devices, we’re working with a less than what we’d get with desktops: less processor power, less RAM, less resources – and less patient users, since these devices tend to get used while on the go. As a result, efficiency is the watchword for mobile apps: anything you can do to get the most out of the limits of the phone is a big help. Hence the jumping for joy when it was announced that the next version of the dev tools will contain a profiler.
Visual Studio is an amazing good dev toolkit, and the Profiler is a great match. Scott Guthrie ran through a quick demo of finding performance bottlenecks using the profiler, and I think that it’s going to help developer create better, snappier, less patience-taxing apps.
Coming to Windows Phone on May 25th – ‘nuff said!
We were also treated to a quick demo of IE9 for Windows Phone, which comes out later this year with the “Mango” update. It’s the first mobile version of IE that shares a common codebase with the desktop version, and hence it inherits those things that make IE9 for the desktop the “well, it’s about time!” browser. Like IE9 for the desktop, IE9 for the phone runs like snakes on energy drinks on ice, and we saw it run circles around Chrome for Android and even more so than Safari for iPhone. Attention other mobile browsers: it’s on!
I’ll leave it to Super Popped-Collar Guy to say it for me:
That’s right: your first chance to get your paws on the dev tools comes next month. Watch this blog for the announcement, and start working on your app ideas!
As with Day 1, today’s MIX11 keynote – which largely focused on what’s coming up in Windows Phone (and yes, lots of good stuff there) – is available via live stream. Point your browser, whether it’s IE9. IE10 Platform Preview 1 or any of those other, lesser browsers at live.visitmix.com to catch it.
If you’ve been to the South by Southwest conference and caught one of the bigger presenters, chances are you’ve seen the folks at ImageThink working furiously away on murals as the presenters did their sessions, capturing their ideas and turning them into graphical form. They were at the MIX conference this morning, capturing all the announcements about Internet Explorer 9 (and 10). Their murals were shown in the main hall afterwards and I snapped some photos of them – click any of the pictures to see them at full size:
If you like this sort of thing, you might enjoy this video produced by RSA Animate, in which an artist provides a rendition of Dan Pink’s lecture on motivation:
Here’s a game that you can play in your browser that shows off what’s possible with HTML5 and what happens when you run HTML5 in Internet Explorer (hint: it runs much faster!). It’s the World’s Biggest Pac-Man game!
The World’s Biggest Pac-Man game starts with the standard Pac-Man board, but if you go into the tunnels on the sides of the maze, rather than emerging from the other side, you emerge in a new Pac-Man maze. And there are a lot of them. Hence the name.
The World’s Biggest Pac-Man runs on any browser that supports HTML5, but thanks to the hardware acceleration, it’s even nicer on Internet Explorer 9.
