From MIX '09: Microsoft embraces PHP, debuts Silverlight 3

If there really is any release news regarding Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft this morning in Las Vegas -- and we expect there will be -- it will probably come during the opening minutes of Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie's keynote this morning. He'll need IE8 to demonstrate everything else on his plate today, and if IE8's not ready for RTM, that fact may as well be stamped on everything he shows. "5-D" wouldn't save Silverlight 3 if that's the case.

Stay in touch with Betanews for live commentary in sync with Scott Guthrie's two-hour keynote session this morning.

11:23am PT: Close runs a little late, but attendees generally impressed with Silverlight 3.

11:22am PT: Timeframe for shipment: Single beta planned, will ship final release later this year. Beta can be downloaded now, along with Expression Blend 3 Preview edition, Silverlight 3 Tool Support for VS 2008, and IIS streaming services.

11:21am PT: Guthrie: "One of the things people really like about Silverlight is that it's a 5 MB download, it takes seconds to install." Fairly rigorous process (like the Spanish Inquisition) to make sure code is as small, fast, tight as possible. Allowed addition of features without incurring more download size...Silverlight 3 is 40 KB smaller than Silverlight 2.

11:19am PT: SAP will integrate Silverlight support in NetWeaver, for its Web Dynamo UI Pro product.

Silverlight outside the browser: Silverlight 3 Can run RIAs outside the browser on both Windows and the Mac.

KEXP.org demo: Tom Mara, Executive Director: "KEXP [Seattle] is a radio station we hope you can fall in love with." Trying to figure out how to get music into your life. Time was, God forbid, you gave the authority to select the music to the D.J. "When we went on the Web, things just took off." Moved from a 10-watt station to one that was getting requests from Iceland.

Aaron Starkey, manager of online services: Demonstrating the out-of-browser experience for the online radio station. Live stream includes a way to interact with the D.J.

What happens when you're not online -- it's very hard to stream to you when you don't have interactivity. Silverlight notifies the listener that he can listen to downloaded content in isolated storage, perhaps some video along with it.

After reconnection, the live stream and comments from time of disconnect have returned.

Windows 7: An out-of-browser app can be pinned to the taskbar. Makes KEXP a "first-class citizen." We stay connected, we stay right in front of our users. (In an otherwise uncluttered or un-pinned taskbar, maybe.)

Demo on the Mac, notice it's the same player. "We can offer a really holistic experience of our content" even outside the browser.

11:06am PT: Guthrie returns: Enabling designers using Macs to build assets that can be imported into Build. Eclipse support from Soyatec for building Silverlight apps on Macs.

Data binding improvements, new support for Binary XML.

Running overtime at this point. Demo of a supplier management app using Silverlight. Application opened in Visual Studio has a server and a client component (ASP.NET, Silverlight, respectively). Defined a Customer, Order object for querying data on the server. Customer domain service takes advantage of multi-tier data support, exposes data to client using .NET methods exposed as public members of the class. Silverlight client will automatically get a proxy class it can use to query changes in action.

10:56am PT: Automatic documentation of content.

Client can click directly on the UI, specialized events can be created to respond to special client actions. Transitions are modeled on a real flowchart at the bottom of the Blend workspace.

Behaviors in Blend 3: enables you to add interactivity to objects without writing code. Drag-and-drop is one example.

10:50am PT: Can enable feedback from remote clients who can type their comments into the context of the active sketch. Can also draw directly onto the prototype. Annotations are saved in context, can be resent to the Blend user.

10:48am PT: Will launch a site with 54 free historical back-issues of Playboy to peruse.

Guthrie: Expression Blend 3. Adds more capabilities for site developers to build sites without writing any code. XAML, C# support added there anyway.

Jon Harris, Sr. Project Manager, Expression Blend 3: Circular games menu being developed for Xbox.

Sketchflow Prototype can enable folks to literally draw concepts in sketch form on a whiteboard, and enable those prototypes to be played on the Sketchflow player -- kind of a PowerPoint for demonstrating Web functionality. Functionality can be sketched in a free-flow flowchart style, multiple aspects and possibilities can be kept track of.

10:38am PT: David Anthony, Bondi Digital Publishing; Scott Stanley, Vertigo. Helps magazines make digital channel for their printed product. Saw Deep Zoom working within Silverlight, "it was an A-Ha moment for us."

Magazine is the competition. It has zero boot time, random access. Bondi has been working with Rolling Stone, Silverlight shows the entire issue as though pages had the staples torn out of them. Click and drag to find an article, then zoom in. Text is "very readable." Massive content now exposed for people to read and browse.

Zip to the end of the 172-page issue. Flip to the back cover to see the Top 40 list. Or can jump using search back to October 1993. Yellow squares show where search text is highlighted, so perspective transform enables search screen to be flipped over in 3D to make room for text.

10:33am PT: Ripple, shader, emboss effects (I don't know why, it's just cool), can be applied to any control.

Integration with SEO, deep linking, monetizing through search engine traffic. New navigation, page framework being added to Silverlight 3. Providing ClearType support on Windows, Mac, multitouch support. Provide more than 100 controls, some through the new Control Toolkit. Rich ecosystem of controls.

Library caching -- can reference a control library, any assembly within the application. Once it's downloaded, it can be cached on the system, doesn't have to be downloaded again. Improves application startup time.

Merged resource dictionary, style inheritance.

10:29am PT: Live ad insertion with the ad streams, "still be able to enjoy the live event while still finding a way to have our partners associate with us."

Guthrie returns: RIA. "Silverlight 3 significantly ups the ante with regard to what you can do with graphics on the Web."

Perspective 3D -- take any control, any image, apply a 3D transform to it. Bitwise writes of pixels to the screen, custom shaders (blur, drop shadow) can be applied to any control. So not 3D scenes like some were thinking, but certainly a way to do dimensional transforms. "Please use these powers for good, not evil."

10:26am PT: Last summer, NBC hosted the Olympics, used Silverlight. Perkins Miller, SVP/GM of Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics. Single largest digital event in history, in partnership with the Silverlight group. 50 million unique visitors, streamed millions of clips. 5,000 unique clips viewed per day during the final week.

People who watched Olympics online ended up viewing twice as much TV later, says Miller. "If we deliver something that's going to engage the audience, they're going to watch more."

Vancouver Winter Olympics will be covered in 720p HD and Smooth Streaming online. Will be able to pause, rewind, slow down live stream. Full metadata overlays with context can be played on top of live video.

10:21am PT: Guthrie demo begins: Expression Encoder 2 now shipping. Import the Big Buck Bunny video (we've seen that one before), can change encode profile to adaptive streaming, IIS smooth streaming. Can choose bitrates (3 Mbps, 2 Mbps, 600 Kbps, for example), target the local directory, will encode the video and copy it up to the Web server. Launches a browser, bingo. Player skin will show bitrate. Instantaneous seek, even though the video is HD.

Test different bitrates. Say we cycle down to 1 Mbps. Pause at the 866 Kbps version because not enough bandwidth, but that pause is minimized. Take any existing media format today, re-encode it, deploy. H.264 and VC.1 content, the final form whatever you want with Silverlight. Can do with pre-recorded, live content as well. Hardware encoder-delivered live content, live encoded at 3 Mbps. Can pause live video for TiVo-like experiences, re-zoom, catch up. Can get instant replay, seek back, instantaneous jump. Can click "Live" to rejoin the feed, added to the Web server. Can automatically archive the video being displayed, publish the archive version.

10:17am PT: IIS Media Services: Web download on top of IIS, one-click installation. Enables highest-quality video experience on the Web as possible with minimum TCO. Smooth streaming pioneered with Olympics experiment.

Live Smooth Streaming: In addition to pre-recorded content, can take hardware and software encoders, broadcast those at huge megabit rates. Edge caching in order to push videos out as far as possible, Akamai already offering smooth streaming capabilities. Bit-rate throttling, advanced logging.

10:15am PT: Demonstration of Netflix player (w/o Silverlight 3), showing debugging screen. As soon as the buffer is exhausted, can step up streaming by 500 kbps.

Guthrie returns: New media scenarios with Silverlight 3. Enabling hardware-based graphics acceleration on both Windows and Mac. True HD quality media, in addition to VC.1, support for H.264, AAC audio, MPEG-4.

Write codecs in C# or Visual Basic and install your own codecs as add-ons without Microsoft having to add them in. Improved support for media analytics so that ads can be added in, security improved.

10:12am PT: Silverlight 3, Netflix is looking forward to seeing GPU support for scaling and stretching video.

10:10am PT: Installer complexity had come from content protection. Now that's built into Silverlight, so a lot of that evil is removed from the customer. Higher bitrate means better experience, and adaptive streaming enables that fine-tuning to take place during the delivery process. But the problem there was "rebuffering," which forces the user to sit there and wait. "Something that we want to avoid."

So Silverlight can let Netflix change the video player every two weeks, try new adaptive streaming parameters based on player feedback. Cutting rebuffer rate in half by "pushing the Silverlight player every two weeks." Old player forced users to re-install the player, now Silverlight eliminates that experience for the viewer. Revving the player every two weeks instead of months.

10:06am PT: And here comes Netflix yet again, which is always the demonstrator of choice for Silverlight. Kevin McEntee, VP of Web Engineering.

Couldn't stream Netflix movies to Mac or Firefox because of Silverlight, at first. "For Netflix, the great thing about Silverlight is that the cross-platform story is real." One player without platform-specific code, one code base now so it's no problem.

Installing software for customers is really just evil.

10:03am PT: Guthrie on Silverlight: [Applause] Launched 18 months ago, will talk about Silverlight 3. 350 million installations worldwide, over 300,000 designers using VS, Expression, targeting. 200+ partners in 30 countries. 200+ Microsoft Web sites using Silverlight now.

Releasing new Virtual Earth SDK for building mapping apps with Silverlight.

10:02am PT: StackOverflow.com team comes on stage: Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, co-founders. Surprisingly StackOverflow doesn't seem that popular. Search engines give back "a lot of crap" when developers are looking for answers to dilemmas. Hard to determine what's current. "So we stole a bunch of really cool ideas," says Spolsky, "from other sites to build StackOverflow." Stupid answers fall to the bottom, like Digg. Wiki buttons enable folks to make both the questions and the answers better.

"Every question on StackOverflow is a super-narrow Wikipedia entry for a tiny bit of Web programming trivia."

Atwood: "If .NET is so great, where are the really cool .NET startups?" Instead of asking this question, why not make the first cool .NET startups. They didn't do anything specifically new, they used an old Visual Studio. 200,000 unique users with 600,000 page views per day.

Search engine optimization out of the box. Type your question and end up on a StackOverflow page, so make everything "findable" up front. Encouraging folks to use OpenID.

"URLs are the basic unit of work on the Web, so if you don't do URLs right, you get it all wrong," says Atwood. .NET is known for its speed, so it builds a huge performance advantage. "It's about you showing the world what a great programmer you are."

Reputation scores, badges based on what you've done, just like Xbox 360 "achievements."

Spolsky: BizSpark makes licensing a non-issue. Pre-production licenses for three years, and after that time, you realize either that the cost of those licenses is "a rounding error" or you're out of business.

It's a neat hack -- very little work with a lot of benefit. Spolsky: "Not just a great .NET ghetto site." In the spirit of Dr. Dobbs and Byte magazines, for people who love programming and want to learn from each other.

9:54am PT: Can host Web apps from Gallery on one's own server.

Guthrie: Commerce Server 2009. Integrated end-to-end commerce solution, now available.

Azure: New tools for hosting apps in Microsoft's cloud.

Inclusion of Fast CGI support within Azure. Can now host .NET and PHP applications. Full trust capabilities added. Now has a relational API for whatever data access layer you want, run against raw SQL tables, stored procedures. Can run it on the local server and then the cloud without changes.

Programmatic .NET services within Azure. Azure on track for commercial release "later this year."

9:49am PT: Bill Staples, General Manager, Web Platform & Tools: "Think of [Gallery] as an App Store for the Web server." Community can provide reviews, can install directly from the gallery pages.

9:46am PT: Web Platform installer is now shipping, gives users a single checkbox for including components necessary for running MS Web apps. Free from http://microsoft.com/web.

Microsoft Web App Gallery: Provide a community for folks to find free Web apps for people to download and use on their servers. ASP.NET and PHP apps. Single tool for installing any server components, provision in minutes.

9:44am PT: IIS 7: Rich extensibility layer allows anyone to plug in new functionality to the core Web server. Will ship out-of-band extensions that extend built-in functionality of IIS 7 further. More than 8 extension updates, Web deployment tools that integrate with VS. New FTP server. WebDAV capabilities, request routing engines. All new features can be integrated for free.

9:43am PT: ASP.NET 4 AJAX will incorporate JQuery, and more easily call REST-based services.

Distributed rendering engine Velocity.

Visual Studio 2010 "a fairly major update." A lot of code-focused features, lots of editor, productivity improvements centered around the editor. Much better JavaScript, AJAX scripting support. SharePoint authoring support -- create SharePoint sites directly with VS.

Publishing and deployment tools for Web apps. Separate config files for what lifetime stage your app is within [applause]. Publish your app from the IDE either from a remote server or to a remote cluster of servers.

9:39am PT: Back to Guthrie: Free version of Super Preview beta is available today for all developers.

Server-side Web development: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 "another option that we've heard people ask for." Full control over HTML markup, SEO-friendly URL routings, and test-driven development workflow.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 shipping today for free download.

9:38am PT: Comparison with IE6 view, which clearly shows differences in the rendering. Can find out which elements are misaligned in a split-screen view. "Shaded Punchout" mode shows where the element should be versus where it is. Here, IE6 is clearly the offending browser.

9:37am PT: Erik Saltwell, Group Program Manager, Expression Web: Demonstrating Expression Web 3 "Super Preview." Demonstrates receiving a comp from the designer showing how the page should look. Super Preview shows how the developed code will look in Firefox.

Super Preview full screen contains a bay along the bottom that shows Firefox, a "baseline browser," and based on what we're seeing from the grainy video, IE8, IE6, and Safari.

"Overlay mode" creates an onion-skin that demonstrates what the differences are between the Firefox rendering and the baseline (which is represented by a neutral browser icon, not IE). Checking the onion-skin against Safari "on the Mac." How does it know that? A Web service on Microsoft's cloud runs Safari on the Mac, and provides a picture of how it looks to the Windows user, even without a Mac.

9:33am PT: Scott Guthrie finally makes it on, in his long-sleeve red polo. We won't be able to forget it after that video.

Web, Media, and RIA are the three categories under discussion today.

Standards-based Web: Dean Hachamovich will demonstrate IE8 tomorrow, Guthrie says. PHP, MySQL will be part of the standards-based Web (interesting comment there on the database).

Expression Web 3: focused on building standards-based Web sites. ASP.NET and PHP apps are supported, along with secure FTP, better CSS diagnostics, and a cross-platform "Super Preview" multi-browser option.

Tomorrow may be IE8 day, it turns out.

9:29am PT: Seneca: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Moving now to a video lead-in to Scott Guthrie, featuring a take-off of Scott doing "The History of Dance" (the famous YouTube video), then getting his tattoos.

Yea, it's really about the experience, not the product.

9:26am PT: "Idea-tion." "You cannot really be anal [about this]...These things are far too important to take seriously."

Who should be using what tools? "Microsoft, we're not just talking the talk, we're walking the walk." Three people at MS who were in design when Buxton was hired, now it's ten. Hiring UX [user experience] people at a much faster rate than just technologists.

Example: A design team of basically two people produced the Microsoft Arc Mouse in about 9 months. "It's not about the MP3 space; it's about the measured mile. It's not about the device, but about the whole ecosystem."

Demo of Windows 7 on an HP TouchSmart. "The shortest demo in the world." And that was it, about two seconds. "We've got Deep Zoom going on, so there's no damage here."

9:22am PT: Use Post-It notes, Buxton suggests, to sketch the ideas out fast and flesh them out. Why waste valuable programming time on Visual Studio when you have Post-It notes?

Make Post-It notes into "state transition diagrams." "What do Canada and transitions have in common? They're both dominated by the states."

"If you don't have as much detail in the transitions as you do in the states, you're going to get it wrong. It's not about here [to] here...That's true about everything we do in interactive."

You start with a million ideas and you end up with one, which means you throw away 99.9% of everything you created. Which makes you the most important element in the process.

9:17am PT: Sketches are cheap, fast, disposable, ways to bring out ideas in a minimum of time with a minimum of tools. "There is something called sketching, and there are ways to sketch experience."

"It's not about the product." This to a full audience of developers who are wondering when the products are coming out.

9:15am PT: So much for the theory that IE8 would come out first.

A little exercise with his own HTC Dash phone. In 15 seconds, bang, you designers, draw that phone. "I guarantee, every single one of you is capable of drawing that phone in such a way that it's distinct from that other HTC phone, the Touch. That means you can sketch it, you can draw out ideas quickly."

"Test 2: Sketch the interface. I bet you can't -- you can't sketch out ideas of the interface as well as you can the object. That should worry you."

"The real test is: Draw the test of using that phone. How do we do that? If we don't have the same versatility to draw out the same things with the experience as we do with the object, then we need to start rethinking. If we want to be successful designers, then we have to have the same fluency."

9:12am PT: Compared the multi-color iPod nanos to the multicolor Kodak cameras.

Designers talk about objects, but the experience engendered from the thing is the true product of your endeavor -- it's what the graphics trigger.

Buxton's Trek mountain bike, a replica of the bike that won road races. Another rendering of the same bike gives it some character, like a Pixar animation, especially when you tip the wheel to one side. But even that's not what experience is about -- it's about going downhill and hitting rivers and rocks head-on. "It's not about the bike, it's about screaming into that river with a huge smile on your face, and with adrenaline pumping."

"What is the nature of the smile, or the love, that you're trying to provoke from your users? Same with Microsoft, that's our job?"

9:09am PT: A tribute to Raymond Loewy, the developer of the Coke bottle and the Studebaker Avanti...as an example of leaders in the field of industrial design. That, in addition to what Buxton described, briefly, as "the whole...refrigerator...thing."

Walter Teague, who drove the design of Kodak cameras throughout the 1930s with multicolor cameras. "What idiot would do a design startup on the eve of the Great Depression? But think about it, every one of these companies is alive today, because they all built on experience. If we understand what we applied before, we'll learn [from history]."

9:06am PT: The festivities are under way, at about four minutes past the hour.

Bill Buxton, Microsoft Researcher, begins the festivities with a bit of a monologue: In this economy, he says, with the experience that developers receive here, they'll be able to turn the economy around.

"Luck is not about chance," Buxton told the attendees in Las Vegas.

Return On Experience (ROE): "This is a really good, and a really important, time to be focused on experience." This while the attendees await Silverlight 3 and Internet Explorer 8.