World over Microsoft conducts lots and lots of events every year. Their flagship events are two – Professional Developer Conference a.k.a. PDC (this is where they announce the next big thing like .NET, Windows 2000, Longhorn, Windows Azure and so on) and Tech Ed (this is more hands-on current technologies for IT Professionals with some Developer content) happening almost every year in USA and then replicated across the world. About five years back in 2006, they announced a new event by name “Mix” which for the first time tried to bring 3 stakeholders into one event – Business Managers, Designers & Developers. It was started to promote Web development and Microsoft’s new designer tools family MicrosoftExpression. This was the first Microsoft event where you got to hear Microsoft’s competitors like Yahoo! & Amazon (Microsoft wasn’t in cloud yet in 2006), which I found to be quite useful to get a sense of where Web technologies are going in general. And the lunch-table discussions I had with such a variety of audience were very interesting.
As a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and as a Microsoft Partner for many years, these events have become annual fixtures in my calendar.With the new “Build” event that happened last year (instead of a PDC) where they announced Windows 8, it was clear the existing Microsoft events landscape was changing. And indeed it has changed. First casualty was PDC and today they officially acknowledged that there will be no Mix in 2012. Though I feel sad for an event that offered variety and fun, in the last few years unfortunately Mix was made into yet another Developer event by Microsoft. So it was time the event got killed and merged into a unified better event.
In this moment of our prayers for “Mix” and for its soul to R.I.P I I will like to look back at some of the moments I have experienced around this event.
Mix ‘06
Bill Gates announced and kicked off the very first Mix at the Venetian, Las Vegas. The big announcement was WPF/E (which became Silverlight later) and demonstration of it on a Nokia phone which never got released.
Mix06 was my second or third trip to Vegas so I didn’t understand well on how lodging in Vegas works. I ended up blowing money (literally) by booking a $400/Night (concessional rate for attendees!) room at the venue itself (Venetian).
Mix ‘07
This event was all about Silverlight!. I am sure most of us .NET enthusiasts remember the demo where Silverlight in a browser with C# code-behind winning over Java Script in a game of chess. Looking back (from a world of Node.JS & Chakra) I was not sure on what we were smoking back then in May 2007.
I found the BBC Radio 1 and Windows Live Messenger social co-browsing (called Messenger activity then) & sharing to be quite cool. Unfortunately it never got released outside UK (just like most of the good stuffs from BBC which are available only to UK Residents due to a antiquated theory of UK Tax payer funding).
What got me thinking was a quote made by “The Economist” Publisher Mr.Andrew Rashbass on a panel discussion (which alone was worth my travel to the US from India). The quote was on how Portable Reader devices replacing paper. Andrew said “itwill not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term and that BillG can use one, but no one else will use it”
I think this year Microsoft started to highlight that Mix was a “72 Hour conversation”, a tag line I liked & which I consider to have captured the essence of what Mix ‘06 and Mix ‘07 were. The evening party on one of the days was fun and colourful.
After blowing my money staying in Venetian, I realized how lodging works in Vegas – you can get rooms from $40 to $1 Million per night, it all depends on what you are looking for. From this year, I was booking myself a room at $40 in the Stratosphere Hotel. Although it is on the other end of the Strip, it was a good 30 minutes walk in the evening after you finish your dinner near by to Venetian like in the Food court at The Capital Grille.
Mix ‘08
This year the keynote was by Ray Ozzie who outlined Microsoft’s investment in IE and Silverlight, Web Slices and more. Lots of demos this year.
Then it was Dean Hachamovitch talking about how great IE 8.0 was (do you remember this IE?)
Lot of coverage about live streaming capabilities of Silverlight during the then upcoming Beijing Olympics
My fellow RD Scott Stanfield’s company Vertigo demoing the “Hard Rock” app they have build using Silverlight and Deep-Zoom technology.
Coca-Cola sponsored UEFA Euro 2008 & Windows Live Messenger community (what was that I don’t remember other than the photograph below?)
Due to the onslaught of recession, travel budget constraints and thanks to great live streaming of the Keynotes by Microsoft, the next three years I decided to watch it from Home, only trouble being the need to have loads of coffee to keep me awake through the Night in India. I didn’t miss out the individual talks either – all the session videos were made available from Channel9 for download in few days of the event getting over.
Wish you all a Happy Deepavali 2011 – the festival of lights. Today I had enjoyed my Deepavali celebrations with lots of crackers & sweets (yes, but I didn’t eat them all). Sharing a video below of a Multishot firecracker we fired from our house terrace today. Enjoy & play safe with crackers – remember there is no such thing as being overcautious when it comes to firecrackers.
This is something that I saw two and half years back during Microsoft Mix ‘09 conference. I wanted to blog about it then but somehow seemed to have missed it. Today I was reminded of it when I was talking to my Yoga master about my experience of going to a Doctor in USA and buying medicines there few years back when I fell sick during a trip to Houston. Unlike India where prescription drugs are sold in sealed aluminium foil strips, in USA I found many of the medicines are packaged in bottles.
There was this talk in Mix ‘09 conference following IE 8.0 keynote on User Experience by Deborah Adler, Ms.Adler was an attractive young UX designer whose prescription packaging system simplified the design of Pill bottles & information presented in that. It also reduced the chances of wrong usage of pills and resulting complications. The design was adopted by Target Pharmacies and is marketed under their ClearRX brand. I found the idea of improving on an everyday problem to be quite impressive & encouraging. Check out the video here (skip to 30.30 Minute to get to this section directly).
The default templates shipping in Visual Studio whether it is for C++ or C# or JavaScript, they all do a great job in handling all the layout complexities and do the heavy lifting for building Metro UI
Microsoft has done lot of user study to see the most ideal and convenient position in the screen where user’s thumb can reach and they are in the edges. As a result it is good practise to put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edges
When you are porting your existing Windows Apps UI to Metro, best is to start from scratch, when you can’t even simple things make a lot of improvement (like removing the lines and borders, more spaced out, large icons and so on). See in these four steps from left to right:
Touch is direct, so performance issues are felt more directly and viscerally. Animations when content is appearing of changing helps a lot in the feeling of fluid to the users. Metro Apps require assets in 3 sizes (100%, 140% and 180%) and better still you can provide them in vector formats (SVG) or CSS primitives or XAML.
Your content needs to adapt to multiple screen sizes and orientations:
Contracts are the glue that bind Metro style apps together and to the system UI. There are many contracts, but the three of the most fundamental are Share, Search and Picker.
There are many styles of Live tiles. You can choose the one that suits your app. Live Tiles are updated using your “Local” logic, Scheduled or Push using Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)
In-box controls that ship in Windows 8 for Metro style apps are shown below:
Metro style apps when making calls to WinRT those calls go directly to Core OS or though a broker (only on select cases). All running Metro apps are suspended by the OS when the user switches away from it, this is done to preserve the battery live and give maximum performance to the foreground application. This means Apps get about 5 seconds to save their state before the OS puts them on Suspend. Apps when in Suspend are still in memory but no CPU cycles are spent and Windows kernel never schedules those threads. Apps are also terminated when there are low resources, in those cases Apps never notified at all.
Five main design principles of Metro style apps are
Let me begin by saying this first, I am blown away. What got announced in the Keynote today morning by Steven Sinofsky, makes it absolutely clear that Windows8 is a big bold step by Microsoft and as been repeated many times it is an OS that is definitely “reimagined”. You can download the Developer Preview bits of Windows 8 and SDK for free from here.
Steven Sinofsky in his keynote mentioned some interesting facts about Windows 7:
Approaching 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold
Windows7 consumer usage greater than Windows XP
1502 non security product changes delivered since Windows 7 shipped
542 Million people signing into Windows Live services every month
Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs on Windows 8. Sinofsky demoed a 3 year old Atom Netbook running Windows 8 just fine, same machine actually used less CPU, Memory and Number of processor than Windows 7. Windows 8 now has great Multi Monitor support (finally) even when you are remoting, Task Manager Application improvement, Windows Explorer improvement (long due).
In the keynote he demoed several apps built for Metro UI. Interestingly these were build by college interns. There were 17 groups of them, 2-3 people in each team and worked over 10 weeks time.Quite impressive considering most of them were new to Windows and were working on moving builds of Windows8.
Steven Sinofsky pulled a good one on competition (Google Chrome) when he said “Chrome”less content when he was showing off that Metro apps are full screen with no Titlebar or Windows. Obviously he didn’t say “Window”less that would have minimized Window brand.
There are lot of great stuff shown here, instead of repeating everything I will just cover few highlights:
Metro UI, the new UI in Windows8 is fresh, innovative & futuristic. I liked the Semantic Zoom feature (that shows a reduced view of tiles when you pinch in) that makes it easy to quickly navigate the start screens. Windows8 touch language is certainly a new thinking brought by Microsoft into this space, shows they are not simply copying from others. By being late to the game Microsoft has benefitted from preceding works and learning from them.
Windows 8 has a new App Model that is restrictive (Windows Store distribution only, no app side loading) but one that ensures security for users preventing rogue apps. What I liked in the Windows Store it supports trial mode. Store manages (as now common with iTunes, Android App store and so on) all the security, authentication, payment, delivery, rating and so on. Current Windows Apps (Win32, .NET) say like Quicken you can still list them in Store, but it will only show a link to your website, you will not get any of the features of Store for that app.
Windows 8 has a new Runtime called WinRT (common runtime available for C++, C# or VB, JavaScript) that is a sibling to aging Win32. This is not a layer on top of Win32, but a first class native runtime
Metro Style Windows Live applications like Mail & Photo Gallery are all in development and not made available now but was previewed. What I liked was the Skydrive powered access to drives & folders in remote PCs, a super cool feature through which you can get the files in your office/home PC remotely from any Windows8 PC without syncing or anything.
As a side note I couldn’t help noticing a difference between Apple’s Launch Keynotes (yes I know, Steve Jobs is a legend here) & Microsoft’s launches. Apple focus on lifestyle & experience and technology takes an important but back stage, but Microsoft keynotes are more about technology. Though Windows8 is about touch and new form factors there was no mention on Music, Movies, Games (except one demo) and communication.
I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post .
Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.
I have been a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and I cherish the opportunity to get to know the legends of IT Industry especially in Microsoft Technologies. Regional Directors aren’t Microsoft employees–they’re independent developers, architects, trainers, and other professionals who provide a vital link between Microsoft and the developer community.
Today the day before Microsoft Build conference, we all had a party in Carlsbad, CA at one of our fellow RD’s mansion (OK, not really a mansion but a Track home). I have been to Carlsbad, CA few times before it is a lovely city in San Diego county and is popular for its lovely beaches, Golf courses visited by celebrities and of course Legoland.
The party was held at the house belonging to Tim Huckaby, Founder of Interknowlogy & well known technology speaker. TimH is popular in Microsoft circles for throwing the parties which are exceptionally fun to attend and this one was no exception. We had tasty Mexican catering with snacks, drinks and juices on plenty. At the end of the party with burdened hearts & tons of fond memories we all bid farewell to our RD Manager at Microsoft – Kevin Schuler.
இன்று கணித்தமிழ் சங்கம் தனது மாதக்கூட்டத்தை எங்கள் அலுவலகத்தில் (விஷ்வக் ஸொல்யுஷண்ஸில்) நடத்தியது. கூட்டத்தில் தே.மு.தி.க சட்டமன்ற உறுப்பினரும், மாஃபாய் நிறுவனருமான திரு.கே.பாண்டியராஜன் சிறப்புரையாற்றினார். தமிழக மாணவர்களிடம் கணினி தேர்ச்சியின் அவசியத்தை சிறப்பாக எடுத்துரைத்தார். உறுப்பினரின் பலப்பல கேள்விகளுக்கு அழகாகவும் பொறுமையோடும் பதிலளித்தார். அவருக்கு நன்றிகள்.
I have been attending this yearly event by Nasscom – Emergeout Concalve in Chennai. This year it happened today in Hilton, Chennai – this was the first time I am going to this hotel since it was opened few months back. The hotel was nice and functional, but I couldn’t find any character or inspiration in the design.
Mr.Som Mittal in his speech mentioned Indian IT products are being recognized slowly, for example Scope International of Standard Chartered Bank worked with NASSCOM in adopting Indian IT technologies. 12 products were showcased and 7 got selected.
Keynote speaker was Mr.Krishnamachari Srikkanth who started slowly in his speech but picked up speed and hit the balls all over Hilton. He over-shadowed everyone else in the panel discussion that followed up, but it was enjoyable and unpretentious. Krish Srikkanth in his speech talked about:
Being positive, energy can’t be created or destroyed it can only change
Be bold, play natural, be different. Human nature is to put down on difference
Enjoy what you are doing and don’t worry about results.
More important listen to your heart, don’t go fully based on data & Analytics. Your heart and consciousness is connected to super consciousness and super computer called God. Leaders take decisions through heart not by rational.
Don’t use complicate words like pedagogy and all that. Keep things simple
Fortune favours the brave (தில்லுக்கு துட்டு). High risk high gain
When Leader messes, every one is happy
In Cricket Technology can fine-tune a natural talent. It can’t create talent when it doesn’t exist
In the panel discussion one of the speaker “Ramki” says currently Cricket fans chase information and websites. Why not the information chase or reach users automatically?. One think I didn’t understand in the panel discussion why have a moderator with a star speaker like Kris. The moderator was completely unable to steer the discussion or add value. The next two panel discussions that followed were not inspiring for me, so I left the event during lunch time.
Inviting me to do a Keynote for a workshop beginning on April first, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. But it turned out Anna University new Department (Information Science and Technology) Professor Dr. S. Sendhilkumar was for real on this. And so yesterday I was honoured to be the Chief Guest for their Mobile Application Development two day Workshop on Mobile and asked to deliver the keynote. The inauguration event was graced by Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity) & Dr.G.V.Uma (HOD Dept of IST, Anna University).
In my keynote address I talked around two main ideas:
The first was how during last decade innovation in Mobile Phones technology happened in Fareast (Japan & South Korea), but now United States is back in the driving seat with iPhone & Android. In India we are being known around the world for second largest user base (~600 Million Mobile subscribers) and for our Government’s bungling on how they handled 2G Spectrum allocation. As the Morgan Stanley reported pointed out in 2009, in last two years 5 trends have converged in the mobile world and they are 3G, Social Media, Video, VoIP & SmartPhones. If Netscape was the inflection point for Internet, then iPhone has become to be known as the inflection point (disruptive technology) for Mobile Internet. Before iPhone an average Cell Phone was being used 70% for Voice, now over 50% of usage in an iPhone is Apps & Data.
The second was about Mobile Apps (Mobility software), the potential and importance of it. A simple game from Rovio (Finland) “Angry Birds” has been downloaded over 47 Million in first 15 Months and the company with ~50 Employees is valued at several hundreds of million dollars. If we thought that is out of this world, look at this – a recent game “Tiny Wings” written by a single developer (Andreas Illiger) is the top grossing game in Apple App Store in February 2011. So conventional wisdom of Software Industry and big corporates don’t hold the key to innovation in Mobile Apps. It can be any person with meagre programming skills and a brilliant idea. So students in an academia environment like Anna University are well poised to become the next “Rovio” if they start thinking beyond their books and scores. Good Luck to all the students attending the Mobile Workshop.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.
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_2.jpg "RD Party (9)")
_2.jpg "RD Party (11)")
_2.jpg "RD Party (12)")
_1.jpg "KTS Meeting on 29August2011")
_1.jpg "KTS Meeting on 29August2011 (12)")
.jpg "Dr.G.V.Uma (HOD Dept of IST, Anna University), T.N.C.Venkata Rangan, Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity)")
.jpg "T.N.C.Venkata Rangan delivering the keynote address for Mobile Workshop in Anna University on 1April2011")
.jpg "Seen Prof. Dr. S. Sendhilkumar and T.N.C.Venkata Rangan")
_1.jpg "Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity, Chennai) presenting a flower bouqet to T.N.C.Venkata Rangan")