ReMIX'09 - it was awesome! Big report

ReMIX'09 conference was held . You can read some moments and impressions on the Turbomilkers report . Well, I would like to present, in turn, my impression of the conference, which in two words is characterized as “it was cool!”. Anyone interested, please follow under cat. Careful, dangerous concentration of Microsoft and Balmer.

Impression

The ReMix'09 conference (further, with your permission, simply “remix”) is not just a place for announcements of interesting technologies and launching good projects (for example, the Silverlight version of rutube, which pleasantly surprised me). In fact, any meticulous .net developer has already managed to test all the technologies that were presented at the conference. And in this sense, the remix announcements are just a fixation of the material covered, the main purpose of which is a live demonstration of what has already been proposed. Mikhail Chernomordikov and Petr Didenko in their podcast, which preceded the remix, said that the conference will not only be informed about the technologies, but will be shown how to use them, how to use them now and how now they are used by the most agile companies. So it was: topic by topic, demonstration by demonstration.

But still, the remix is ​​not a preview. Remix is ​​a place of communication. A remix is ​​a lot of interesting and most importantly active people who do not sit still, chewing on the knowledge that they got a certain number of years ago, but they strive forward and are constantly in the subject. In addition, the remix participants are walking success stories. Atilekt, Bibigosh, nginx - these are just some of the projects that hooked me on the remix, representatives and authors of which were available in the communication area, in which you could comfortably communicate on various topics.

The author of Bibigoshi, by the way, is a separate conversation, because the remix was probably not a more charismatic character. The brutal kind of a big guy who, from the scene, tells what a cute project they have for children from 3 to 93 years old is a very unusual sight. Throughout the conference, it was he who often discharged the atmosphere with amusing replicas and injections with Misha Chernomordikov.

Another pleasant moment for me personally was the acquaintance and communication with two guys from Kharkov, Ukraine - Dmitry Pasko (http://xy3.habrahabr.ru/) and Maxim Tikhobrazov (http://tihobrazov.habrahabr.ru/), with we recorded the beer podcast in a completely relaxed atmosphere after the end of the main part of the conference. Vitaly Baum AKA Butaji (http://butaji.habrahabr.ru/, by the way, I recommend his blog ) was also present with us, with whom I have been on the Internet for a long time, but for the first time I met it live on a remix. And so, the four of us together with beer mugs (thanks to Pilsner Urquel!) Freely walked through the second part of the conference and a little along Ballmer. The podcast is ready and you can listen to it (as well as other guys podcasts) here .
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Even during the conference I had a very interesting conversation with Dmitry Soshnikov, a Microsoft representative, an associate professor and a researcher at MAI and MIPT about functional programming, and in particular F #. I strongly recommend Dmitry as an interesting interlocutor. Nice to meet you.

And still the remix is ​​not only announcements, not only people and dialogue. A remix is ​​a huge motivator, a place for recharging. When you see how many successful companies are around, how many smart and enterprising people are moving the industry forward, coming up with more and more new chips, you realize that you have to be the same. Remix - charges. The projects presented on the remix inspire.

Organization

The organization of the conference was excellent. Very comfortable rooms, albeit small, competent organization of work with partners. There were stands of a variety of companies, where they even played something. And I, for example, bought a book at the MS Press booth at a low price.

At the entrance to the main hall, everyone could take a picture with a portrait of Ballmer, who then got into the official bank of conference photos.

There were no complaints about the meals of the participants of the conference, which was held from 9-00 to 21-00. And by the curtain, the remaining participants rolled out a chic gift - Pilsner Urquel beer in large quantities, so that everyone could relax at their pleasure after a busy day. There was another competition for beer: a raffle for those who passed the participants' profiles. They distributed both small prizes, such as mice, video cameras and hosting subscriptions, as well as such expensive items as full-fledged distributions of the Visual Studio Team System.

Details

By the way, about the main part of the conference - Balmer's speech. Here I would like to tell you that Ballmer in pictures and photos is not the Ballmer speaker I saw on the stage. If you, like me, thought that Ballmer is an eccentric, overweight marketer, then you, like me, are greatly mistaken. Firstly, Ballmer is not overweight, this is a man whose form is to be envied, which is very contrasted with common photos. Secondly and most importantly, Ballmer is not eccentric, in that jester's plan that it is customary to remember about recently (“developers”, etc.). Ballmer is a great speaker, probably the best one I've ever heard live. His voice at the conference sounded loud, Steve is clearly loud. Confident suppressive voice, intonation, treatment of the audience (Ballmer addressed the girl on the first row once) movement, gestures - all these qualities leave a very strong impression in general. I can say with confidence that Ballmer is a great speaker and the jokes about him began to look much less important for me. What surprised me so much in Steve's speech was the fact that the manager of such magnitude freely explained topics of completely different orders. From the general strategy to the subtleties of specific products, from a global scale, to cooperation with firms specifically in Russia. The scope of Balmer's speech personally made a very pleasant impression on me - it was noticeable that this is a person who controls everything not in word or in connection with his position, but really pays attention and is aware of every moment from global to narrow in the field. . From Ballmer at the conference were the names of companies, and the mention of Firefox seemed to me a special place in my speech. The fact that the head of the company does not avoid talking about his competitors, in my opinion, is a completely healthy moment and makes Ballmer an honor.

It is a pity that the discussion with Steve turned out to be so short that I didn’t even have time to go on Twitter and type my questions. And I wanted to ask, among other things, whether the upcoming launch of the Zune HD will extend to Russia. Of course, the presentation and communication with Ballmer was the culmination of the conference, and this point can be fully viewed here, and I would like to tell you about what was still interesting.

Another small point to which I paid attention: Ballmer made a great emphasis on the RIA, which hints, so to speak.

Content

In my story, I will not adhere to any chronology or order, so do not assume that the reports took place in the order in which I tell them.

Gaidar Magdanurov report on Dynamic Data and the MVC Framework. Unfortunately, I did not have time for the first part, but found the second. Where an excellent example was considered of how using the definition of a special attribute, one can easily control the execution of actions to respond to a client's platform, whether it is mobile or stationary. As a speaker, Gaidar is beyond competition, it is very interesting to listen to him, he tells simply and easily. It was very interesting.
And I was delayed on the Gaidar report on the fact that I had spent some time talking to Yulia Belyanina (another pleasant acquaintance with a Microsoft representative), who oversees the MVP in Russia and helps them in every way.

Silverlight. I noticed that when Mikhail Chernomordikov starts talking about his favorite Silverlight theme, then there is no doubt that, starting from a medium turn, the report will be dispersed so that Misha will not keep up. In a good way. Mikhail, in my opinion, very competently reads reports, practically not stumbling along the whole length of a long topic. One can only envy such an ability to present complex technologies to people to tell rather complex topics and to show examples without having gotten lost or switched to ekaniye. At your leisure, try to tell something at least to the mirror and see how difficult it is to express the flow of thoughts in a clear and smooth speech at the pace in which Misha does.

Of course, I really liked the report of Misha, although, of course, I already knew about all the new Silverlight chips, but I was pleased to learn about the implementation of Silverlight in Russia. The example of RuTube and Bibigoshi. In addition, Misha showed interesting technological examples that I had not seen before and which can be downloaded from the remix site. Another pleasant moment was the announcement of the translation and free e-book on Silverlight 3 into Russian, which can now be downloaded. Smooth Streaming was also mentioned, about which you could read on Habré .

But the most impressive was the tech demo of the guys from the actio.tv team, who presented the hypervideo technology - a new word in the interactive video. Imagine that you can follow links in video files just like on web pages. Watch you horror movie and want to know what kind of chainsaw - click! - and now the presentation of Druzhba chainsaws with a description and prices. Very innovative and promising technology on Silverlight. Protected by patents, by the way, and, apparently, with excellent support and sponsors.

Security and Internet Explorer. Quite a lot of time in the report of Michael was given to security. In this regard, Misha told about the SDL methodology, which was adopted by Microsoft. I am familiar with it from the book “Protected Code”, which I strongly recommend to anyone who is interested in the problems of security and reliability of the code, as well as those who do not know anything about the development procedures at Microsoft, but are trying to discuss this topic. Read the book and most likely you will understand why after Windows XP SP2 the reliability of Microsoft’s code has grown by orders of magnitude.
As for IE, I was amused by a short demonstration of Michael, when he literally took steps in the spirit of “press this button” and talked about how to create slices for the browser.

SharePoint. The final part of the conference was the report of Dmitry Martynov. The speaker himself was not particularly memorable to me, rather, he simply invited partners to the stage, and did not read the report, but interesting topics were raised. The partners told how and why the .net platform was chosen, how they are already making a lot of money on it, why introducing sharepoint is simple and profitable at the same time. After a series of these reports, my personal attitude to this technology has drastically changed from neutral to bewilderment to positively interested. In one of the reports, for example, at the beginning of the conference, they showed the integration of the SharePoint portal and Outlook along with the mobile platform (by the way, Gaidar also showed this demonstration).

Rest. There was still a lot of things, but I wanted to tell only about what I remember and impressed. There were also reports from: Andrei Beshkov - a high-class specialist who talked about hosting on the Microsoft platform; there was a speech by Dmitry Khalin and Sergey Polyakov; There were wonderful reports from Atilek (about $ 10 million), 1C-Bitrix and many other companies. There were a lot of pleasant, interesting, funny little things (there was a lot of funny things on the UMI.CMS report) that you just don’t think about or don’t tell about. In short, it was cool!

PS: I did not tell about the fact that I was also shown at the conference and told about the showcase project I wrote for the remix. It was nice, but for me it’s not the most important thing, of what happened on the remix.

PPS: I am ready to tell any details in the comments.

* all photos are taken from www.remix.ru/Photostream and www.flickr.com/photos/turbomilk (thanks Turbomilk!)