Xperimentality

Since my return from MIX06, my mind has been racing with a more hightened concept of the web as an experience. I have always thought that web design and public facing web applications should invoke an emotional response as well as an intellectual one; that browsing the web should be an experience more so than just a mundane task. This, in my mind, is what keeps an audience returning to a site.

Some of the things I have seen at MIX06 have solidified and hyped this feeling of the web as an experience. So I have decided to personally embrace this "experience the web" concept and let it drive me. I have changed my blog warmer to reflect this, and plan to reflect it in my blog content as well. I look forward to getting more feedback on how we as developers can inject the "experience" into our development.

Well, now that I have been back for a day and tried to absorb all the material presented at MIX06, I have to say that it can be overwhelming. I thought I had a pretty good handle on Atlas and WPF. But as a web developer, I realized that there was so much more than what I had previously thought was coming down the pipe.

Web developers are having, truely, a brand new world of possibilities handed to them. The richness of the web experience, for it will soon be truely an experience, is exploding! We are going to have to learn to think and design without limitation. That is the only way we will be able to take advantage of all the capabilities soon available. For so long we have had many limitations. Recently, there has been a push to go beyond some of the more common and burdensome limitations, but nothing on the scale of what is to come.

All I can say is this: Throw off your shackles and chains and get ready for a whole new freedom...get ready to not just browse the web, but to experience it!

Well, it is over for me at least.  I am here at the airport waiting for my flight. I had to leave the event a little early to make sure that I wasn't running like a chicken with my head cut off.  I missed some of the first session and had to leave in the middle of the last session so I spent some time in the sandbox this morning.  For those who weren't there, the sandbox is a room where they had lots of computers set up to do labs, browse online, and play with some of the technologies presented on. I did attend

Breakout 2: Building Components and Services for the Programmable Web presented by Nikhil Kothari

I have to say that this was one of the best conferences I have been to. Not the typical marketing being done. I got a lot of good information about the technologies available to us as developers now, but that are more forward looking! I am excited about what is coming down the road. Now it is up to all of us to begin changing the state of web applications, to embrace a new model and new possibilities.  I personally can't wait to see where we go!

Well...I have found my first casualty of dasBlog with the new IE7!  I was testing here at MIX06 in the compatibility lab for IE7.  I was working on Vista with the latest build of IE7 and found that the admin bar for dasBlog does not show up once logged in.  All the other admin icons show up fine, it appears to just affect the admin menu bar.

Not sure where the problem actually exists. I am going to set up a test environment and do some more looking. If anyone else has seen this problem, let me know.  Otherwise, I will see what I come up with and post another entry.

Well day two was just as informative as day one.  I went to the following presentations:

Breakout 1: Lessons From the Trenches:Engineering Great AJAX Experiences presented by Scott Isaacs.  This one hit close to home since he talked a lot about some of the things that are of great interest to me and are some of my soap box topics!

Breakout 2: Designing a Better User Experience with AJAX and "Atlas" presented by Brad Abrams and Rick Spencer

Breakout 3: A First Look at Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E): a Cross-Platform subset of WPF presented by Joe Stegman

Tuesday night I had some free time with no sessions and no formal event (although there were some informal events going on here and there). I managed to see some of Vegas including a great show...;)

Saw the latest IE 7. For those of you who know me, you know that I am a big Firefox guy. I won't knock IE, and use it sometimes, but there are just some things about Firefox that, in my opinion, can't be beat.

Having said that, I like this latest IE 7. I had looked at the previous IE 7 Beta and was not impressed at all. But let me say that this latest one looks more like what I was expecting to see.  From what I have seen so far, I could see me using IE 7 a lot more!  I am going to use this new beta for a while and see what I think.

Just thought I would mention the presentations I went to on day 1:

Breakout 1: The Windows Live Platform: Build Applications That Have Access to 400 Million Address Books, and 13 Million Contacts presented by Brian Arbogast and Ken Levy

Breakout 2: Developing a Better User Experience with "Atlas" presented by Shanku Niyogi

Breakout 3: Developing a Windows Presentation Foundation Application presented by Filipe Fortes

The eventing reception was held at the TAO Nighclub at The Venetian. The evening made for a great time. I would go into more details but they say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so I guess I should just leave it at that!

Yesterday was pretty good as far as presentations. Went to some good presentations on ATLAS and WPF...some stuff I had seen before but some stuff really impressed me.
I have to admit, I was really impressed with Scott Guthrie's presentation on ATLAS. He started with a blank page and within about 7-9 minutes, built an ATLAS todo list. Now the application was not extremely complicated functionally, but the fact that he was able to put the whole thing together in such a short period of time was nice. It was a really nice example of what can be done in such a short period of time.

The keynote was awesome. This is the first event I have been to where Bill Gates made a personal appearance. I have to say, it was pretty cool. It was a great keynote, Tim O'Reilly and Bill had a question and answer session focusing on Web2.0 and where that might be going. Bill made an announcement that they have a go-live license for Atlas!

Well, it was an interesting night. We flew into Phoenix headed for Las Vegas and had a layover. We then found out that our flight to Las Vegas was delayed. We were given an option to seperate from our luggage and take a flight that was leaving immediately and we did...hey, better to wait around in Vegas, right? Needless to say we waited around  in Vegas for a while and finally arrived at the hotel around 11:30PM.  But I am here now!