Learning's from Remix 09 Australia – Azure, Blend and Silverlight
When I attended Remix last month I made some notes in the evening on what I learned that day:
Top Line:
- Silverlight is extremely rich in features that make create appealing user experiences quicker than before
- Much of the learning's from other technologies such as Surface have been reused
- This has led to rapid appealing applications emerging and new cloud platforms options to assist
The Silverlight site has some great videos on what's new in Silverlight 3.0
- Azure service management tools demonstrated looked very appealing
- Eventing through Azure was possible
- Configuration for Azure was pretty good
- There are tools to load SQL data to the Cloud.
Such as taking the data from a SQL Server database and upload it in their Azure table storage account
- Easing
- Behaviours
- Physics (example) (also see Physics Helper)
- Perspectives
- Storyboard and animations have had a major overhaul - Hold, transition/ease and new brush types
- Visual State modeller and transitions are a major step forward in describing and modelling UI animations
- Out of Brower (OOB) and Save to File can be brought to life using behaviours - Silverlight project options enable OOB
- Assets and tab docking are now possible
- Blend 3 works with TFS
- Vissl – Amazon search tool
- Ninemsn Grazia (recordable and sharable navigation)
- Thought Sensor prototype – use of brain waves to track mood/expression and feedback to application (from ANU and many others)
- EMEU Card (card with authentication)
- Prototype to real AFL game analyser (point being that PoC’s are invariably very close to the real thing – and therefore worth doing)
- Grays Online ie8 Accelerators and Web Slices
- Lonely Planet – Surface Application to Silverlight portability
Other:
Sketchflow (experiment with ideas for dynamic user interaction)