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Remix UK 2008 – Day 2

Day 2 is off to a flying start with Scott Guthrie on stage showing off the soon to be RTM MVC framework. Good stuff but I’ve done so much rails in the past that I know the benefits of both MVC and webforms and webforms wins hands down, but each to their own I suppose.

After Scott I find myself sitting in the wrong room looking at the wrong session so it’s a quick dash to find Chris Hays’s ASP.NET Front-End Performance . Filled with great advice this session had a cookbook feel to it ( if you do x you get y) and Chris is an engaging host ( even if he is dressed like an extra from Saved By the Bell )

Next up is Mike Taulty with a session called ‘No Silverlight App is an Island’, that is focused on breaking out of the Silverlight runtime to interact with the outside world via the HTML DOM, web services, JavaScript and sockets. Interesting, informative and the session with most raw technical content of the whole conference.
Eric Nelson follows with a brutally frank once-over of the ADO.NET Entity Framework that I’m sure left most viewers with the impression that it’s just not ready for line-of-business applications. Good stuff all the same.

Then there is more Mike Taulty with A WPF Silverlight crossover session. I haven’t touched WPF at all so it was good to see that the transition between both models is relatively painless.
Finally it’s the Sneak Peeks where Microsoft unveils all the cool technology that it is going to unleash onto the market any time soon. To be honest this time its a let down compared to last years overload of innovation. The best thing was a kind of home-made-ghetto-Surface-Computer-type-thing that stores family photographs made by some boffins at Microsoft Research. Pretty under-whelming really.

All in all the event this year was much more of a mixed bag than the previous years conference. It’s obvious to me that Microsoft is entering a phase of transition. Competitors are becoming more agile and invasive in areas that Microsoft are keen to make advances in and there is much ground to be covered in order to catch up.
Maybe the reason this conference was so light on content is that all the good stuff is being saved for PDC. Only time will tell.

Remix UK 2008 – Day 1

I often feel I’m out of step with what the general consensus of opinion is about any particular subject and sitting through the keynote of Remix UK 08 just validated it for me. I put it down to the ingrained desire to question everything, a desire to truly understand a problem domain in order to resolve it and the ability to realize the difference between passion and plain old bug-eyed ranting.

Today Bill Buxton was just ranting. 30 minutes of ranting about design. I love a good rant as much as the next man, but if you are going to hector me about design for any prolonged period, make sure you are not doing it in front of the worst designed powerpoint I’ve seen for a long time. Do not tell me ‘Lawyers saved Apple’ or ‘Design saved Apple’. Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious. Instead of telling me who saved Apple, tell me who is going to save Microsoft. 

Microsoft Expression Suite is LIGHTYEARS behind the fluidity of use that Adobe provides in Flash or Photoshop. Expression Web is no better than Dreamweaver 3 and that must be nearly ten years old. There is a reason why most designers will not touch Silverlight and its because the tools are not good enough.
Bill’s main thrust was to “design for the experience”. Cool, well start with your own experience and tools first before telling me what is wrong with mine and everyone else’s.

Add in technical hitches, disjointed jumps of narrative and logic and several ‘haha you English drink cups of tea’ jokes, I was ready to get my coat. I’ve no doubt that many people in the audience thought it was ‘passionate’ and ‘brave’, bah  – get over yourself.

Enter Scott Guthrie who gives a great talk filled with solutions not problems. I stick around all morning for his Silverlight sessions and although at least 50 percent of the content was exactly the same as last year ( even some of his slides had ‘Mix07′ in the bottom right corner! ) there was much to learn and enjoy.

Lunch is a brief affair and then it’s back in for a Session on ADO.NET Data Services with Mike Flasko. Mike’s presentation was simply amazing and delivered at such breakneck speed you couldn’t fail to take on his obvious enthusiasm for the technology. It was so good that your brain fizzed as it struggled to multitask between imagining the fantastic possibilities or scenarios for use, and being scared to miss something. Startlingly good stuff.

There is not much good stuff to choose from for the last session, and I cant imagine that the Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips session consists of more than 1 powerpoint slide with the words ‘BUY RESHARPER’ on it, so try out the XNA programming session instead. It was good and delivered with passion and enthusiasm by Paul Foster but not really my bag. Everyone else enjoyed it though.

So thats day 1 in a nutshell, patchy. The freebie count is a little low right now so I will be putting in extra effort on day 2 to resolve it.

Remix UK 08 – The Journey To Brighton

It’s the day before and me and a handful of colleagues leave Liverpool to venture south to attend the Remix Uk 08 event being held in Brighton. What follows is brief pictorial of the journey.

Seconds after entering the car, Paul tries to install ASP.NET on the TomTom.

 
Lunch

Arrival in Brighton and a view through the venue doors of what awaits.

We are staying at the Grand right next to the venue if anyone fancies meeting up for drunken talks about Silverlight framerates and the benefits of Lotus 123 in the enterprise(!).

Our contingent decides to skip the trivialities of sleep and begins to queue outside the venue at 10.20 the evening before it opens(!).

Stay tuned. More news as it happens.

Microsoft Remix UK 08

"ReMix UK 08 is a 48 hr conversation; join us from the 18 – 19 September 2008 at the Brighton Centre, Kings Road, Brighton. ReMix UK 08 is all about the ‘Next Web’, what it means today and the potential impact of technologies, tools and techniques for the future. "

If you want to attend, you better get a hustle on and register as tickets are selling fast by all accounts. Last years event was fantastic and this time around it’s set to be bigger and better than ever. See you there!