It's really hard to believe it's already Friday and MIX 08 (for me, anyways) has come and gone. It has been a fun week- lots of fun people here to hang out with, lots of fun information being delivered from Microsoft- and it's been an exhausting week. Hopefully you enjoyed some of my live coverage of the keynotes and are taking advantage of the recorded MIX sessions to catch-up on everything else. Now that the week is wrapping-up, though, it's time to reflect on the news and the conversations and start trying to make sense of all the info. This process will probably take some time, so expect posts in the coming weeks to delve in to this topic in more detail as I start to connect the lines between MIX news and Telerik's plans (this is Telerik Watch after all).
Until then, I'll leave you with my general impression of MIX 08. Actually, it's very easy to sum-up MIX 08: Silverlight 2.0. The beta shipped. The big partners (AOL, Olympics, Astin Martin, Hard Rock) showed demos of sites soon to go live. Ballmer even mentioned his excitement for Silverlight in his keynote/interview. While other big news was announced- IE 8, WPF performance pack, a little MVC- Silverlight handily dominated most conversations and a lot of the sessions. There is no question that this is the year of Silverlight and I expect by the end of the year we'll start seeing many web apps running on this sophomore platform.
What does that mean for Telerik? We'll see. The better question is what does this Silverlight news mean to you? Telerik has always been in the business of building the tools you need and want, so make sure you start talking to us loud and clear so that we make the right plans. And with that, I'm off to the airport to catch my 1 AM flight back to Texas and I'll talk to you all next week!
3 comments:
Silverlight is great, very impressed.
Not so sure how MS are going to get Silverlight on to 90% of machines though. (The installed base for Flash). They do have some big partners but not enough and there doesn't seem to be a stratgey in place. Was this talked about at MIX08?
Still, it should do well enough to co-exist with Flash and it will give Adobe a well needed kick up the rear too.
My concern with SL is performance. With 1.1 we've been told that it uses JS so that's why it's slow. OK, I can work with that. However, I went ahead and downloaded the beta for 2.0, and went to the demo site, the one with controls, and I think I'm noticing a worrisome trend. I fired up the page and the task manager. Doing simple things moving my mouse over the calendar control took my CPU close to 20% (I have core 2 duo machine). Moving the slider up and down was able to shoot my CPU to 10%. Other controls seem lighter. Should I blame this on the beta status? Until it can compete (read faster) with Flash, the only adoption we're gonna see is what MS is pushing. Your thoughts?
P.S. And why oh why does it use 80% of my CPU when viewing a video in full-screen? I've tested this on several machines with SL1. When the video is in the browser the performance is OK, when in full-screen it explodes :)
@Pete- There was a lot of talk outside of the keynotes about Silverlight plug-in adoption. I think MS is on a good track. 1.5+ million installs per day currently. Olympics will be a big boost. I think it will be adopted quickly.
@Anon- Good point about performance. I'll run some tests in the coming weeks to check what you've reported and post my results.
-Todd
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