MIX10 round-up day 2 – the day after

So…as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been posting as aggressively today as I did yesterday…(Well…it wasn’t actually yesterday… I started writing this post when it was yesterday, but got sidetracked and had to continue today, Wednesday). There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I have meet WAY too many people I knew to just sit in a corner and write blog posts. Second, I went to the official party last night…which was interesting with about 4000 people attending and only about 50 girls except for the staff…

But anyhow, the yesterday progressed as it should, a great keynote and lots of interesting sessions about the WP7. And even though I have found some gaps in the platform, I still find it VERY interesting. Not to mention that the UI is the cleanest looking UI I have ever seen on a phone. I guess I want to try it before saying it is the best UI, but it looks very promising…

Let’s start with the keynote. If you haven’t seen it, it covered topics as diverse as IE9 and VS2010. But one of the coolest things during the keynote was once again the warm up. Before the keynote started there was a guy painting on stage. He was using a multi-touch display to do it together with a “drawing” tool from Microsoft Research. The technology was awesome. We later in the session found out that the screen he was drawing on was a prototype screen from Wacom. It looked to be about 26” or something and was using a combination of finger touch and stylus. Basically the stylus work as pencils/crayons/brushes, while the fingers could be used to smudge the paint. Very cool.

After that, there was as I mentioned some talk about IE9 and the HTML5 support it will add, as well as talk about how much better it should be following the standards. They have really listen to the market and try very hard to get the standards support good.

There was also a long presentation about codename “Dallas”, which basically exposes a DB through a RESTful interface with filtering support and delivers the content using ATOM. Looked interesting…but we will see. Another technology focused on the cloud.

Scott Hanselman demoed some sweet features in VS2010. Mostly focusing on a jQuery extension for templating JSON data returned from AJAX calls. Scott is a seriously awesome presenter. His presentation also included using a nice new feature to make his privates public (if you weren’t there and wonder what the £$%^@ I’m talking about, check out the keynote here).

But…however cool and good a speaker Hanselman is, the person that made the biggest impression on me was the legend Bill Buxton. I write legend, because he is, even if I can’t even tell you what he has done. He just owns that title. And after the talk he did today, I fully understand why. He had an AWESOME talk about NUI and doing things naturally. Once again…go and check out the keynote. He was also the one that got the artist back on stage to show off more of the cool drawing app.

The phone sessions have left me wanting a bit more though. I’m sure that the WP7 will be an awesome device, but as with most technical things it will need some time to grow into it. I’m sure that I will love the UI and that I will love the device, but as a developer I feel that there are a few things that I will be missing out on. Small things… Such as the lack of an API to access Bluetooth, sending SMS messages from my application without having the user doing it in a different window and a few other things. There are still a lot of things that are unsure about what will actually be available on the phone, but some things will be missing. The Marketplace will automatically check the application and make sure it doesn’t step out of the sandbox. But I would really have liked a way to request the application to be less restricted. I know that for example sending texts without user interaction might be dangerous, but at least give us developers a chance to do so somehow. The general idea with .NET is that we can request permissions to do things, it would have been nice to be able to this on the phone as well. It didn’t even have to be very granular. Just make it two levels. One that lives in the sandboxed world without access to the devices storage, text messaging, contacts and so on, and one that allows the application to operate much less restricted. Heck, just throw up a huge freaking warning at installation that warns that the application will be able to text your  mother in law with messages that you don’t want her to get. That should make sure that the user understands.

And yeah…one final thing…there will probably be a nice little flame war when the phone is released. All the Apple fan boys will try to keep their position at the top with their iPhone, and they might do that for the first release of the WP7 to be honest. But one thing that Microsoft left out of the WP7 that will hurt A LOT at that time is copy-paste. I remember how a lot of the non iPhone people flamed the iPhone as an immature unit due to its lack of a simple feature like copy-paste. Well…I guess that will turn around and bit us in the butt in a couple of months… At least the WP7 will have MMS. So I guess I can always use that as a comeback when I get flamed by the iPhone fan boys…

So…that’s it for now. There will be more later. I’m leaving Las Vegas this afternoon to go back to NZ, but I will try to get a post MIX10 post up as soon as possible… Time for another session about the phone. Istvan Cseri has just started talking…

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