Do you want your app to integrate with one of the world’s leading photosharing site? The Flickr for Windows Phone 7 app is a full featured mobile application that is pushing the boundaries of UX design and is 100% built on Flickr's API methods that are available for developers. This talk will introduce the mobile app, highlight some of the complex design decisions, and provide insights into the Flickr API methods. Attendees will learn how to enrich their applications using Flickr's rich content via the Flickr APIs.
Ever wonder what it takes to create a top game for Windows Phone 7? Rob will show you how easy it is to get XNA programs running, whether you are a C# and Visual Studio newbie or a grizzled veteran of .NET. You will find out how to use the touch and accelerometer sensors and how to add a smattering of physics to your games. All the demos will be provided with full source so you can take them away and use them to begin creating your own games based on the abilities of this wonderful device. If you want to know how to take game ideas and give them life then this session is for you. And you might be in danger of winning the odd prize. Which should be exciting.
The infographics bug has bitten, and now the web alive with tightly kerned upper-case Helvetica and scatter plots to showing us everything from what a billion dollars looks like all the way through to how hard it is for singer songwriters to make a living.
In the midst of all the nonsense, there have been some significant changes in design trends that can make company dashboards or analysis tools more powerful.
This session will
1. Explain the goals of data visualisation and the benefits for business
2. Walk through some great examples of stunning, but most importantly, *useful* visualisations of data sets that will leave attendees better equipped to tackles mountains of data in their applications.
and
3. Present case studies showing companies getting a real return on investing in their data.
This session will be driven by real practical examples, and will be of interest to designers, application owners, and web developers.
Also, it will be fun :)
Over 500 million users! That is the universe for your app. So “learning Facebook” is critical. Come learn how to use the Facebook C# SDK built in cooperation with Microsoft and Thuzi, a Facebook Preferred Partner. Thuzi will also share lessons from creating Facebook promotions that have been architected to handle over 10,000 signups an hour. We will show how to build Facebook applications with .NET using ASP.NET MVC, Web Matrix, Web Forms, Silverlight and WP7 and how to host them on Windows Azure.
In the past year, we’ve worked with hundreds of developers and designers interpreting the "Metro" design system for their own purposes. We’ve seen great interpretations, and others that aren’t so great. In this session, we’ll share with you the foundations of great Metro application design for Windows Phone, and how to use them to build outstanding applications that will stand out and get noticed… for good reasons.
Welcome to the Orchard Project – a free, community-focused, open source CMS built on .NET and designed meet the needs of developers, designers, and end-users alike. In this talk, we’ll build a site from the ground-up using Orchard’s admin panel and flexible module and theme system. We’ll look at the available ecosystem of modules and themes in the Orchard Gallery, and take a peek “under-the-hood” of Orchard to demonstrate how you can write your own custom extensions, widgets, and more. We’ll also delve into the Orchard’s template system in detail, demonstrating how you can create a highly-customized look-and-feel for your site. We’ll end by actually shipping our totally customized Orchard-based application to a live site.
Let’s say you are in love with Silverlight, .NET and the power of Visual Studio. Then one day you hear the world talking about HTML5 all at once. Why? What’s that thing? In this session you will understand what HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 are through the lens of a XAML and C# developer. You will learn to use the best of both worlds to build your next beautiful applications. Expect a lot of technical demo and samples!
Today, there is a lot of hype about the cloud. In this session we’ll cut through the hype and buzzwords and give you a practical introduction to the Windows Azure Platform. You’ll see several demos of common scenarios so you can understand how to start using the cloud today with your web applications. You will also learn about the new features and services that have been released in the last year and will be announced in the keynote.
- Craig Kitterman
and
- Paul Batum
at
Lagoon F
WebSockets, an emerging specification being standardized by W3C and IETF, will enable web browsers as well as client applications to open a bi-directional, full-duplex communication channel with a remote host. In this session you will explore the scenarios that will be available to HTML5 developers in the near future and you will learn more about the low level details of the APIs and protocol, including its benefits over the traditional long polling approach. The HTML5 Labs team will walk you through the implementation details and source code behind the client and server components of the Web Sockets prototype and will share their firsthand experience in working with the new standard.
Typography in digital experiences is unavoidable, and for years it was a fight we mostly lost. Today, however, technology is on our side! High resolution screens, an expanding library of open fonts and new flexibility in nearly every UI technology have made digital typography more fun and more interesting than ever. We'll cover all aspects of working with digital type: everything from choosing complimentary typefaces to licensing, rendering and a system for layout and sizing. We all love type. Come to this talk to learn why!
In 2010, the MIX session "Understanding the MVVM pattern" helped you to understand the basics of this very important pattern used in Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications. Building on this foundation, this year’s session will show you with a lot of code samples how to build complex interactive applications using proven best practices and powerful tools.
Laurent Bugnion, a user and promoter of MVVM since the early days, author of “Silverlight 4 Unleashed” and of the acclaimed MVVM Light Toolkit, will help you to deep dive in MVVM and explore topics such as navigation, showing dialogs, collecting user feedback, handling multiple views and viewmodels, and more.
We all want to make piles of money with the next great phone app. In order to have that great app, you need to be prepared to continuously refine features and improve your users’ experience. Knowing which features are really being used, how often, and in what combinations are what will unlock the door to true user-centered design and development; the break-out WP7 developer will be the one who most efficiently navigates through shifting market dynamics and deployment gotcha’s inherent in any emerging platform to focus on the features and form-factors that most appeal to their users. Thanks to an agreement between Microsoft and PreEmptive Solutions, Windows Phone 7 developers have free access to a mobile analytics service that monitors and measures application adoption, feature usage, user behaviors, and even exception reporting for both Silverlight and XNA applications. At the end of this session, attendees will know how to instrument their application and track those features most important to their success including how to configure offline-caching, automate opt-in logic, and exception reporting. With effective mobile analytics, there’s simply no excuse for not knowing exactly what your users care most about.
This session will share the lessons learned working with the first one hundred Windows Phone premier applications. This includes common challenges and difficulties experienced. We'll deliver detail on what we learned.
Heard about Microsoft Surface 2? In this presentation we will introduce you to the new Microsoft Surface Hardware and explain how you can write applications for it. By the end of the presentation you will have learned how to use the Microsoft Surface 2 SDK to write an application that bridges the physical world we live in to the virtual world on the Surface. We will also discuss what it takes to write an application that targets both Microsoft Surface Hardware and Windows Touch Enabled Devices. And of course, you will learn tricks of the trade, like how to write an application right away using the new Microsoft Surface Input Simulator. We will focus on WPF development, but anyone with an interest in Natural User Interfaces should be able to follow and enjoy the presentation.
Most people using Windows Azure are using ASP.NET and PHP, but Windows Azure is much more general than that. Steve Marx will show how he built a few web apps (including his blog) that run on Windows Azure and don’t use .NET or PHP. Server-side JavaScript, Ruby, and Python will be the most prominent examples.
As a consumer web startup, you spend a significant portion of your time raising awareness of your brand and driving traffic to your site. But, what happens when you succeed? How do you scale instantly from on-boarding 1 new user an hour to 1 new user every 5 seconds? MyWebCareer operates one of the most sophisticated and complex platforms on Windows Azure. For each new users that registers, our data discovery engine runs dozens of searches in real-time against 10 different 3rd party API’s. Add to this the subsequent data normalization, entity, link and semantic analysis and career scoring and you have a platform that requires some pretty hefty processing power. Learn how MyWebCareer found out at 6pm on a Thursday night in March 2011 that they’re on the front page of Mashable.com and how they scaled within 20 minutes to support the resulting spike in traffic and data processing.
Learn how you can make your sites faster directly from the Internet Explorer Performance Team. These are the same guys who brought you GPU accelerated graphics and compiled JavaScript with Internet Explorer 9, and they’re going to share their favorite 50 best practices for web developers. This session will provide an inside look into browser performance, discuss why common web best practices are important, and then go deep into how to get the most from new HTML5 capabilities including Canvas, Audio, Video, SVG, local storage, and more.
Microformats are simple HTML design patterns for adding semantics to your web content. With additional semantic meaning, your content becomes more findable, extensible, standards-compliant and usable. And when built on a solid foundation of Plain Old Semantic Markup (POSH), your content also becomes more accessible.
Emily Lewis, author of Microformats Made Simple, will discuss the benefits of microformats, as well as tools and resources to help you start publishing right away. But the focus will be on the practical application of microformats using POSH: link-based microformats, XFN, hCard and hCalendar. Emily will also discuss what HTML5 means for microformats, particularly microdata and the new semantic elements.
The Microsoft platform for delivery of video and rich media experiences has fundamentally changed and grown significantly since the introduction of Silverlight and IIS Media Services several years ago. Come learn about the encoding tools, digital rights management components, transcoding services, player development frameworks, analytics tools, content management systems and other tools and frameworks which comprise the Microsoft Media Platform (MMP).
- Rick Barraza,
- Joshua Blake,
- Neil Roodyn,
- Bart Roozendaal,
- Josh Santangelo,
- Nicolas Calvi
and
- Dennis Vroegop
at
Lagoon H
The Natural User Interface (NUI) is a hot topic that generates a lot of excitement, but there are only a handful of companies doing real innovation with NUIs and most of the practical experience in the NUI style of design and development is limited to a small number of experts. The Microsoft Surface MVPs are a subset of these experts that have extensive real-world experience with Microsoft Surface and other NUI devices.
This session is a panel featuring the Microsoft Surface MVPs and an unfiltered discussion with each other and the audience about the state of the art in NUI design and development. We will share our experiences and ideas, discuss what we think NUI will look like in the near future, and back up our statements with cutting-edge demonstrations prepared by the panelists involving combinations of Microsoft Surface 2.0, Kinect, and other NUI devices.
Microsoft Research is working on several cool ways to make web applications faster and more robust. In this session, James Mickens will describe two projects that leverage JavaScript to improve web programs running on unmodified, commodity browsers. His talk will focus on Silo, a system that exploits DOM storage and AJAX to make web pages load more quickly. He’ll also describe Mugshot, a framework which allows developers to capture and replay JavaScript application bugs that users encounter in the wild. Neither project requires users to install a plugin or otherwise change their browser.
- Thomas Lewis,
- August de los Reyes,
- Corey Schuman
and
- Chris Bernard
at
Breakers L
Want to be inspired by design and UX? Catch this "Inspiring UX" lightning session with four inspirational topics! UX Lightning sessions are a full hour session with 4 exceptional speakers each presenting 10 minute topics. Hear from Thomas Lewis speaking on "Why is that Monkey Not Wearing Pants?", August de los Reyes with "21st Century Design: a 10 Minute Manifesto", Corey Schuman with "Goodbye Mouse, Hello Touch", and Chris Bernard with "7 Things Developers and Designers Need to Know About UX.". This session is intended to open your minds to new possibilities with design.
How do you manage the dizzying array of input sources, ranging from traditional UI events and external service requests to new user interface touch gestures and device sensor detections, while keeping your Silverlight and Phone applications responsive? In this session, you’ll discover how the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library simplifies the programming model by letting you declaratively compose increasingly complex asynchronous operations over these diverse data sources. We will demonstrate some practical uses of Rx for Windows Phone 7 by building a dice playing game including responding to user interactions, creating gestures from the device’s sensors, and making Asynchronous service calls. In the end you’ll learn how to coordinate pushing data around using Rx.
Come learn how to use the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service as a key building block for your web applications. See how your applications can seamlessly work with LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and corporate identities - all from a single codebase. Watch the barriers to entry disappear, and behold the emergence of a simple way to deal with identity in your applications. It's guaranteed to be a show you won't want to miss.
JQuery turned the world on its ear. Do we still write JavaScript or do we just write jQuery? Damian will answer that question with new JavaScript techniques and AJAX as well as some jQuery plugin surprises up his sleeve. What are the best libraries and practices for using jQuery and JavaScript with ASP.NET? How should balanced applications be designed to make the best use of the power of the server and the power of the client?
The increasing diversity of Web-capable form factors—from phones to tablets to televisions—makes it challenging to build HTML experiences that best use the available screen real estate. New CSS features under development like CSS3 Grid, Flexbox and Multi-column will give designers the capability to control their designs without making hard assumptions about browser window size and screen orientation. This session will drill down into the capabilities of these emerging specifications and provide a hands on experience how you can preview them today using IE 10 Platform Preview 1.
While JavaScript has become one of the most widely used programming languages in the world, it has also unfortunately remained one of the most misunderstood programming languages. This session will give a thorough review of the core ideas in the JavaScript language, including topics such as objects, conversions, prototypal inheritance, and closures, as well as popular design patterns. We’ll also discuss the additions to the language coming with ECMAScript5 and how best to use them to create more scalable and reusable code. Whether you are new to JavaScript, or already a seasoned JavaScript user, this session is your opportunity to get a deep and focused understanding of the JavaScript language.