The Best Stuff from MIX08
This week was Microsoft's MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. The event was filled with announcements, demos, and the debuts of new products, like IE8. Some of the news was expected, but there were other things that came as a surprise (like IE8!). If you weren't able to attend this year's conference, here's a guide to everything you missed.
The New Products/Technologies
Internet Explorer 8: If you haven't heard about IE8 yet (our review), then you must have been on a desert island for the past week. Microsoft's new browser, available now in beta form, offers a lot of new features. (See the complete list here for the items not on this list). Here's what you need to know about what's new for IE8:
- ActiveX Improvements offer greater control over who can install the controls and on which sites they can run. Activities are a type browser extension that acts on user-selected content to perform an action, like "email" or provide more information, like "map this," or "translate this." These are contextual menu options which help you find info faster whereas before you would have to copy & paste from one web page to another.
- WebSlices let you subscribe to content directly from within a web page. When content changes, you're notified on the Favorites bar (formerly called the Links bar).
- Automatic Crash Recovery - this new feature will automatically restore a session if the browser crashes or hangs.
- The Phishing Filter became the "Safety Filter," and now better detects spoofing. It also now blocks sites known to contain malicious software that could harm your computer or steal your info.
- Compliance & Standards - CSS 2.1 Compliance, Better CSS printing, CSS Selector API support, Acid2 Support
- AJAX Navigation lets you navigation back and forth in an AJAX application.
- DOM Storage allows pages to cache text on the machine to reduce network latencies.
- Connectivity Events allow websites to check whether you're online and receive notification of connectivity changes.
- Six connections per host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8.
- XMLHTTPRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.
- Integrated Developer Tools
Silverlight 2: the next version of Silverlight has arrived. Microsoft announced 1.5 million installs of Silverlight per day. Some of the new features include:
- "Adaptive Streaming" gauges bandwidth capabilities on the client and picks the appropriate bit rate and encoding, which can be adjusted on the fly.
- Progressive downloads will offer a burst of download at first, then throttle to only stay a certain number of seconds ahead of the user watching (as you determine), which saves on bandwidth costs.
- Can use Ad Manager to track ads and engagement of ads made with Silverlight
- Alerts can overlay on top of the video
- Silverlight video can be rewound when streaming live content
- Silverlight will offer picture-in-picture
- New versions of Visual Studio, Expression Blend support Silverlight
- Silverlight on mobile devices - the same code, assets, skills, and tools for running Silverlight can help you port it to mobile devices.
- Silverlight controls offers templating capability, custom animation, state changes, all without having to write code making it easy for designers to skin apps.
- Silverlight 2 will be available on Linux via partnering with Novell.
- Silverlight + Seadragon - this is one of the coolest things seen at MIX08. Silverlight integrated Seadragon technology, now called DeepZoom. This high-resolution zooming technology allows you to zoom in and out quickly without the need to download an entire picture and it scales from mobile devices with slow connections to the fastest broadband connections
Silverlight + Deep Zoom
SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing web services and Microsoft's offering for storing data in the Cloud.
- SSDS is accessible using standards based protocols (SOAP, REST) for on-demand data-driven & mashup applications.
- Offer a business-ready SLA On-demand scalability
- Companies also will be able to use Microsoft's Sync Framework to enable a form of offline access to SQL Server Data Services in an ability to sync offline data up with the cloud
Things You Gotta See
- Internet Explorer 8 - download
- The Hard Rock Memorabilia site featuring Deep Zoom - this is one of those "gotta see it to believe it" things. You can also build your own Deep Zoom.
- The new, Silverlight version of the AOL webmail client.
- The Keynotes/Demos from MIX08 - Hard Rock keynote/demo, Steve Ballmer and Guy Kawasaki , and Keynote: Ray Ozzie, Dean Hachamovitch, Scott Guthrie
Who's Using What?
Silverlight is being used by AOL, Aston Martin, Cirque du Soleil, DoubleClick, Hard Rock, Move Networks and NBCOlympics.com on MSN. Silverlight Mobile is being used by Weatherbug
Takeaways
- Time for another browser war.
- Amazon may have been first with S3, but Microsoft isn't taking it lying down. SSDS lays the groundwork for them to bring more elements of SQL Server onto the web.
- Did you see Deep Zoom? Microsoft did something cool.
Quotes
- Ballmer on Yahoo: "We've made an offer. We've made an offer and it's out there, baby."
- Guy Kawasaki said, "DVDs are so passe," (defending MacBook Air's lack of features). Ballmer retorts: "Tell that to your kids on a long flight, pal!"
- Ballmer: "Web developers, Web developers, Web developers, Web developers!"
- Weatherbug guy, regarding Silverlight Mobile: "we tried to do this with Flash - it didn’t work."
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@ "Web developers, Web developers, Web developers, Web developers!"
So, Apple with iPhone and Google with Android are throwing money at companies to start building stuff on it's platform, and Ballmer is giving the public what it wants:
"Web developers, Web developers, Web developers, Web developers!" Cool move :)
Posted by: NotSteve | March 7, 2008 1:20 PM
Sarah keeps telling me I overlook Microsoft's B2B services (focusing too much on consumer ones, such as Zune or Vista).
But surely aren't IE8 and Silverlight aimed at the consumer? At least Silverlight is cross-platform but I really wish Microsoft would ditch ActiveX in IE8 instead of improving it because for non-Windows/IE users it's near impossible to use which only further aids vendor lock-in.
How many sites actually utilise Silverlight? If you asked the average Joe, excuse the pun, I'm quite sure they wouldn't have a clue what Silverlight is. As awesome as many of these Silverlight sites look, I'm sure most consumers would rather stick with Flash which is still the de facto piece of software for interactivity.
Posted by: Joe Anderson
|
March 7, 2008 1:20 PM
Microsoft makes me want to do everything in my power to make me fight against their products, defeat their proprietary protocols, make their innovations look ridiculous in the light of open alternatives... Microsoft believes that it still makes sense to introduce proprietary standards (did anyone ask for .ocx ??) in order to lock in customers and make sure that their products won't work with anyone else's products.
That's fine. But I have an urgent message to IT departments and design firms -- you can design your websites and web applications in a way that 100% of your possible market can use them. OR you can allow yourselves to become voluntary slaves of Microsoft, helping them enforce a hegemony of mediocrity, utilizing their technologies to serve only those people who chose to submit to them and pay their licensing fees.
So will you be a tool for Microsoft and use IE8 and Silverlight? Or will you participate in the new path of openness that embraces and tolerates all?
The choice is yours.
Posted by: Ted Shelton | March 7, 2008 9:38 PM
"So will you be a tool for Microsoft and use IE8 and Silverlight? Or will you participate in the new path of openness that embraces and tolerates all?"
Are you against Adobe AIR/Flex as well? Should everyone simply stop innovating and instead conform to standards that are based on the innovations of a half decade ago? The web's good enough as it is, so let's not try to improve our experiences, that's what you're saying?
Posted by: Dan Grossman | March 7, 2008 11:58 PM
No Dan, that is not what I am saying. What is frustrating is that Microsoft uses innovation as a lock-in strategy. Did you notice that Adobe products don't just work on Vista and IE? You can use them on IE and Firefox, on Windows and Mac. Adobe Air for example will work on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X. The Flex 3 SDK is available on all of those platforms AND on Red Hat and Solaris. While Silverlight is available, for the moment, on Mac - look what happened to IE on the Mac! It was available just long enough for some companies to build "IE only" websites and then it was discontinued. There are still websites that I go to from Safari or Firefox that tell me that I have to have IE...
Microsoft sees standards as a way to wage war against competitors. I like my innovation to build on top of standards. When IE supports as much of the W3C standards as Firefox, let me know.
Posted by: Ted Shelton | March 8, 2008 6:03 AM
Ted - Silverlight 2 is available in both IE and Firefox, on Win / Mac / and Linux. And I'm sure we'll see it on mobile devices in no time. (if it's not available already)
Furthermore it has been planned that way from the start.
There is nothing "standard" about Adobe - just because they choose to support the three major platforms doesn't mean they are "standard." They made their own standard, just like everyone else. And I can bet that if Adobe made an O/S than whatever other packages they built would work on their O/S the best. If only because that's what their developers would use the most and it would be the most implicitly tested.
Stop spouting the same old rhetoric - it's getting more and more lame every year that Linux doesn't win the desktop and Apple builds its OWN proprietary crap-tastic software. Stop holding one company that likes to make money to a higher standard than other companies that like to make money and do the same backroom deals and marketing ploys that Microsoft does. Instead, maybe see through your veil of F.U.D. for a minute and read some of the blogs from Microsoft employees (like Scott Guthrie, or the stuff on the Port 25 blog) and realize that these guys aren't evil - and that they are VERY aware of the need to make things as open and standard as they can.
So, do some research and some reading and stop falling back on the same tired lines of others.
Posted by: Dave | March 8, 2008 7:06 AM
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See here for HD Van Gogh Paitings: http://www.zoomomail.com/b8612b694c69d783a5ccf7dc9b284ec9
Or here for more examples: www.zoomorama.typepad.com
Membership is free, 2Gb of storage.
Looking forward to your feedback on this Alpha version
Posted by: Franklinss | March 9, 2008 1:59 PM