I have seen ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit in its beta builds. After its release, I haven’t checked it recently. Today in Mix ’07 I got a chance to sit in a demo session on that. They have added pretty impressive list of reusable controls like the SlideShow, Animation, etc. They all work using JavaScript and on a wide range of browsers. Microsoft have also open-sourced it for community development in CodePlex.

In the Web Services Buy or build Panel – discussions where on how Smugmug.com uses Amazon’s S3 Storage instead of building their data center for redundant storage. How Redfin.com uses Live Virtual Earth instead of their own map implementation.

There was a cool session on WPF by my fellow RD – Scott Stanfield demoing on Seeing Dead People, check it out. Scott was fantastic, don’t miss the recordings. He demoed Charles Petzold’s XAML Cruncher tool from Petzold’s book which is the best reference book on WPF apart from Nathan’s book. He showed how you can import an Adobe Illustrator vector into Expression Designer and do fancy stuffs with that. They spent like 2500 hours totally on this & 3 Designers full time. Lessons learned: In the initial version they stored all data in code then they moved it to all resource files, all the family tree data was in a binary serialization then they moved to XML Serialization so that hierarchies and nestings can be handled better, initally they did XAML by hand then moved to Expression Blend. Scott also demoed a cool Game build as a XAML Browser App (XBAP)

The session on Silverlight media integration by Mike Harsh covered the following:

  • Everything about WIndows Media Tools continue to work
  • Showed how easy it is to build a simple Media Player with Silverlight
  • Demoed a fantastic player showing 6 to 8 live broadcast playing from Internet, switching, full-screen, etc.  
  • Silverlight supports WMV 7,8, 9 / VC-1, WMA, MP3 and the runtime has everything that is needed to play including decoders, etc.
  • Showed how Expression Media Encoder can convert media files and output cool media player experience without coding

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