Mix11–Day 2 Sessions

I blogged here about my Mix11 bootcamp sessions, and here about my Mix11 day 1 keynote and sessions. To continue the theme, here are some thoughts and opinions around Day 2.

Keynote #2

This keynote started a little slow with some apologies and explanations around delays in Windows Phone 7 updates coming. Necessary but unexciting. After that though, things moved along well. Lots of great new features coming to Windows Phones in the form of the “mango” update to come soon. Things like better much performance, SQL databases on the phone, better multitasking. You can read about all the features here. One thing that I personally liked was the fact that IE9 will be the browser on Windows Phone and replace the current klunky browser version. This means I can target Windows Phone 7 with HTML 5 apps like I can with iPhone and Android. Nice.

All the new features that will come with the Mango update will really make WP7 a much more polished device.

The developer tools update for Windows Phone 7 look just fantastic. Really polished and it will be a real big gain. Being able to emulate titling your phone, gestures such as shaking the phone, and other smaller items such as placing breakpoints on bindings in XAML markup will make development so much nicer. Microsoft have done a huge amount of work here and it shows.

Silverlight 5 was announced and the beta is available for download from here. There are a huge number of improvements in this new release and it looks really nice.

Kinect played a big part in this keynote with some awesome example of what the community has done with the Kinect. In particular, a fully mobile lounge chair, controlled via hand gestures and the Kinect. Also, the Microsoft Telescope demo using the Kinect was excellent. All attendees were also given a free Kinect which was fantastic and obviously made everyone happy.

A great keynote overall.

Here are some thoughts on the sessions I have attended.

Douglass Crockford: ECMAScript 5: The New Parts

Its Douglass Crockford. End of story. If Javascript is your thing, then you really can’t go past this to get some insight into where the language is going, from the man himself.

Back To Square One

This talk was presented by Nishant Kothary and it held almost no technical content. A little but not much. You might think that this is a negative thing but that is not the case. I found this talk exceptional and provided many insights into why and how we think like we do. It looked at why some projects have failed, and why some succeeded. In addition, there was some really interesting material around left vs right hemisphere brain function and how that relates to developers and designers.

It was a really interesting presentation and I found it one of the best and most refreshing of Mix. Entertaining, engaging and informative. Highly recommended.

Go download or stream the content from here.