The MIX conference happens every year and its latest installment was this March at the Venitian (NICE!) in Las Vegas. It’s hosted by Microsoft and they go over their latest and soon to be released web technologies.
I attended a great Ellerslie .NET Usergroup meeting two days ago in Auckland, where Nigel Parker (Microsot NZ’s User Experience Development Advisor) went over some of the new stuff being release by Microsoft over the next few months.
I rarely develop web applications, but it was very interesting to see how advanced some of these technologies are getting. While he went through some interesting tools such as side by side Silverlight development with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio (version 2 of which to be released at the end of this month), the technology he spent a lot of time on and which was very interesting to me given my photography interest was Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom allows you to create a collection or montage of images of any resolution, and users can zoom in and out to them. It streams the parts of the image you’re currently seeing, much like Google Earth. You can see how useful this can be when a Deep Zoom solution is exposed by Silverlight 2.0 over the web, and its uses are endless. If you want to see how cool this is check out this post from Nigel for a quick sample and links to other sites. This will be a really interesting technology when it becomes possible to dynamically load the pictures you want to use. Imagine, an application with Deep Zoom capabilites that loads some dynamic photos from Flickr using the Flickr API?
Also, follow this link to get all the technologies presented at MIX ’08.
By the way, if you live in New Zealand and work with .NET or other Microsoft technologies, make sure you’re part of the .NET User Group mailing lists and keep track of the events.
Also, in Auckland, subscribe to the mailing list of the very active Ellerslie .NET Usergroup to be informed of future meetings.
Now back to BizTalk and WCF!
