Lubo Blagoev's Blog

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at MIX08. I just watched Scott Guthrie at the opening key note. He talked about so many things that I didn't remember them all after I finished watching the movie, so I decided to try summarize them here:

• Just Released .NET 3.5, VS2008, IIS7, Windows Server 2008. - I don't know what that means since I am using these for a couple of months now. Well except Longhorn 2008. I think they don't count the MSDN subscription downloads.
• ASP.NET MVC, ASPNET AJAX updated, ASPNET Dynamic Data framework. - Well not yet. Scheduled for "Late this year". I expect this to be this summer since they are talking about couple of releases in that timeframe. Preview releases are available right now though.
• IE8 beta 1.
• CSS 2.1 support at the final IE8 release.
• CSS Certification. They have submitted 702 test cases to W3C test group available at MSDN under BSD license.
• Performance. That's one of the reasons why I switched to Firefox. It is interesting why we don't see these kind of comparisons from Microsoft when they release a new product but we see them just when they are releasing the next version of this exact same product. To tell you the through IE 8 beta 1 is more slower than IE7. But hey its a beta 1 remember?

• HTML 5 Support.
• Better history(Back button) support for AJAX sites through HTML 5 hash functionality.
• Network aware sites through connection events.
• DOM storage. Save pages locally temporary.
• IE developer tools, - Updated. Yeah Firefox has couple of them right now.
• WebSlices - Subscribe to a web page part in IE8. For this to work web sites should specify couple of CSS styles to a div.WebSlices specification is available right now through Open Specification Promise. Samples are also available.
• Silverlight 2 beta  1 available right now. - I installed that immediately. Like the 1,5+ million others do per day.
• Rich High Def Video.
• Adaptive Streaming. Silverlight monitors network bandwidth and automatically adjusts the quality of the video. Very good. I don't know if all those flash video players support that, but in any case this is a must have functionality. Moreover you can plug-in your own algorithm for stream adjustment into the media system.
• Windows Media Services 2008 for Windows Server 2008 - 3x faster, free and already proved to work in real world scenarios.
• IIS7 media pack. - Shipped already. Throttling media buffering download to be only seconds ahead of the current video position.
• Advertising. Making money from your site.
• Silverlight ad template. A wizard for creating advertising for you to include in web pages.
• Atlas AdManager. Manage and track your advertising campaign. Many tracking information. Most importantly how much of the video the user have watched. They call it Engagements. Very detailed really.
• Expression Media Encoder 2. Visually add marker points for dynamically load ads over the video. Very good non intrusion way to show advertisements as overlays on the video the user is watching. XAML overlays also supported.
• NBC Olympics web site is going to be great. - The main issue was that they have less than 150 days to finish it.
• Multilingual support JavaScript, VB, C#, IronPython, IronRubby.
• WPF UI framework support. Layout management. Databinding, Skins and Styles and Animations.
• Networking stacks. REST, SOAP, WS-*, HTTP endpoints, Cross Domain Networking, Raw Sockets support.
• Linq query support.
• Local cache support. That is interesting. Maybe SQL Compact for Silverlight?
• Higher performance.
• Small download 4,3MB.
• Microsoft is partnering with Novel to deliver Linux support for Silverlight. That is great. Most probably it will kill Moonlight project.
• Built in Controls. Available as open source. You can modify them as you see fit. Available already.
• Testing framework for UI controls and for non UI code. 2000 unit tests. Available already as open source.
• Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight Beta 1 and Expression Blend 2.5 March Preview support. These Expression tools will never come out of beta. Don't you think?
• Silverlight Deep Zoom functionality available for you to use it on your web sites. See it in action on Hard Rock Memorabilia.
• SharePoint Silverlight extensions. Yeah! I am very excited about this specifically, cause man that software will really survive the sun apocalypse. In fact I think this Silverlight thing was invented for this in the first place.
• Mobile devices support. That's huge. How in the world we are going to catch up with iPhone without this.
• Silverlight support on Nokia Symbian S60, S40 and Internet Tablets OS. That's fantastic news! Do you remember the Silverlight's code name? WPF Everywhere anyone? Now what Nokia needs is a nice Singularity OS for mobile devices to get rid of the Symbian+Java crap running on in.
• WPF improvements.
• More controls.
• Streamlined .NET setup. .NET 3.5 is installed by default on Windows Server 2008 but is not installed by Vista SP1 setup.
• Startup performance.
• Graphics Improvements. Offload more onto the GPU. - Will be available as a summer update.
• Custom graphics effects. Onto the GPU also. Custom effects for you to implement. Over pictures, movies and controls.

That is a very long list of announcements. There are at least 15 things I want to test right now but I know I will skip it. As always the time that we have is very limited. The next set of Betas and CTPs are coming very soon. That's how's live on the verge of technology.