Mix Essentials 2008

I attended the Mix Essentials at Monte casino yesterday, a big thanks to the organizers for a great venue and for organizing Brad Abrams.

South African developers have been a bit deprived in getting to meet the legends of the business, I was fortunate to meet Juval Lowe last year at Dariel Solutions WCF Master Class, and with Brad coming out this year things are definitely looking up.

Silverlight was the focus of the event, and it looks great, and it has good tool support in the form of Blend. Would I use it? Maybe, as a developer the touchy feely artistic side of UI development has never really got me excited, but I understand that the UX is all that a user sees and it can make or break any application.

I think the success of this platform will depend on its uptake in the designer community who already has a large investment in Flash. I as a developer will not be moving my web apps to Silverlight soon, but I can see myself incorporating pieces of Silverlight into ASP AJAX sites where a bit of bling is needed.

Good news is that ASP.NET AJAX is here to stay; Silverlight for now is aimed at RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications). The contracts to build such applications usually go to advertising agencies and graphic designers, not hard core development houses.

Dev shops need to know about Silverlight, and its capabilities and can leverage it to add to the UX of their offerings, but I do not see it replacing ASP.NET AJAX for line of business applications just yet.

I followed the developer track, and really nothing earth shattering was on show, Brad demoed ASP AJAX which we have been using for years now, nice that it has been built into VS 2008, but you still need to get the toolkit for all the latest controls.

This is becoming a mature platform, there are lots of great controls, and optimizations available.
MVC framework is a great project to watch in the future I feel that it is still a bit immature as it is today, but it is a great idea. The routing engine is clever and having the ability to use URL mapping rules to handle both incoming and outgoing URL scenarios adds a lot of flexibility to application code.

It means that if we want to later change the URL structure of our application (for example: rename /Products to /Catalog), we could do so by modifying one set of mapping rules at the application level - and not require changing any code within our Controllers or View templates.

Brad hinted that versions of MVC for WPF and Win Forms are in the pipeline. Could he be alluding to the WPF Composite client project, a rebuild of CAB for WPF?

Dynamic Data was on show, this seems like the BLINQ project renamed, it currently only works with LINQ to SQL, but Entity framework will follow soon. It is fully customizable and could be a great time saver in certain projects.