MIX: first day, EVERYTHING you wanted to know about Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight 4

Full and absolute guide to the materials presented yesterday on MIX

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The MIX conference is the largest web development event in the world: three days, more than 130 reports and sessions, dozens of speakers from different companies from all over the world. I made a detailed description of the conference in this article , refer to it if you want to know what kind of event it is and what topics are discussed on it.

Let me remind you that all information and online broadcast can be found at http://live.visitmix.com/ .
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A record of the past keynote can already be viewed at www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/videogallery.aspx

What did the conference bring on its first day?
Below are a lot of pictures (they are small). Lots of text.

Rumors and expectations

By the way, if you want to get a schedule of all 130 sessions of the conference in your Outlook, then you can follow this link .

Even before the conference began, the network was already full of rumors and information. I will give the information, topics, and releases that leaked in advance:

• Microsoft announced that the company intends to launch the open source project Silverlight Analytics Framework . This tool will allow analyzing the attendance and usability of your silverlight applications;
• the long-awaited final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM became available, its source codes under the free MS-PL license, and even a rather unexpected roadmap for MVC 3, which you can read about in Russian in this post ;
• The search results for the long-awaited Silverlight theme for Symbian unexpectedly appeared in the Bing search engine, and the results also unexpectedly disappeared.

In the meantime, the situation was heating up, nerve tweets began to appear in the network like:

Confirmed: the Windows 7 phone is a Quad-Core, Silverlight 5 phone.

or

The rumors at Mix are out of control. OUT OF CONTROL! IE9 on iPad just confirmed.

Some even led to Miguel's provocation and retweet messages with puzzled questions.

Further more. Journalist Tim Anderson tweeted the following message:

Molly Holzschlag evangelising both Opera 10.5 (her employer) and Internet Explorer 9 ("will kick butt") - says msft now gets stds

Molly, who does not know, is one of the most influential women in the web industry. It turned out that IE9 is worth waiting for only the good, even if the Opera evangelist looks at it with optimism. The situation was heated ...

Coincidence or not, but today an extremely interesting webOS project has been updated on Silverlight windows4all.com . Now the project is called SilveOS, has a bunch of applications and significantly improved speed, nice look and the new domain silveos.com .

The first!

Time passed, the opening of the event approached. As usual, “suddenly” leaked information and a link to a new product: Microsoft Translator v.2.0 . Information spread over the Internet and Twitter, you can read about it in this post Neowin .

In short, this is an evolutionary development of the existing widget for online translation of sites on the fly. This widget is on many sites, for example on my (progg.ru) and it allows you to translate your pages into 30 languages ​​in a very beautiful manner, while not occupying the top of the screen when it is not needed. The new, second version of the widget, not only transformed externally, but also received excellent bonuses:

• the ability to choose translation options for proposals from the community;
• the ability to make a contribution to the translation and to edit the translation if it is incorrect. Thus, the next reader get a well-translated website.

The possibilities of the new tool are excellent! To add the ability to edit the translation and thus help the community and a useful development tool is a great move. However, while the use of the widget is available only by invitation. I sent my request, and send you.

And then it started rolling ... but at first, the 16-year-old champion Yo-Yo warmed up the audience, the things he did not convey with pictures, you need to see the video:

Announcements, Demonstrations, Tools

Silverlight

After a technical demonstration, Scott Guthrie took the stage and voiced the following data on Silverlight:

• firstly, the penetration of the Silverlight platform on users' desktops reached 60%;
• secondly, there are companies that already use Silverlight in their business applications

Presented technology and new technologies that have appeared in the fourth version of Silverlight



Silvelight 4 allows you to open video on one monitor and continue to work on other monitors, Flash is not under force



And here is the first sensation: the software, on the basis of which the online broadcast of the Olympiad was built, is available to everyone in the form of open source!

Take away the Microsoft Silverlight Media Framework v1.1 from here http://smf.codeplex.com/

And then: a new version of Silverlight 4 RC is available for download today and now!

Take her out of here http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/ and the following tools:

• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Runtime or Mac Runtime
• Expression Blend 4 Beta
• Silverlight toolkit
• WCF RIA Services
• Online Silverlight 4 Documentation
• Offline CHM help Silverlight 4Documentation file download

As well as Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP to start development for Windows Phone 7.

Further more! Expression Blend 4 will be available for free to users who have purchased Expression Blend 3! Wow!



A small demonstration of the data innovation project - Pivot . Now he works on Silverlight with the ability to embed in their applications!

ebay

Next came the turn of the eBay team. They build a solution on Silvelight for their site. Yes, one of the largest Internet sites has chosen Silverlight for its service; this is a great success of the platform. The application will be a desktop application with the ability to search for a product by scanning its barcode with a user's camera.



An eBay speaker on a specific example explained how easy and very pleasant it is to prototype applications using SketchFlow (you can read more about this tool in this article ).



And finally: Silverlight 4 will be released next month, apparently along with Visual Studio 2010, which is scheduled for release on April 12th. We wait!

Long-awaited Windows Phone 7!

The first 15-20 minutes of the Windows Phone presentation repeated what we saw at the WMC conference in Barcelona a month ago - an introduction to the platform, interface concept, sections.

It was finally confirmed, the applications on Windows Phone 7 are FULLY Silverlight 3 applications, not “Lite” and not some subset, but completely the same. Plus, additional features like accelerometer support. For high-quality games, the XNA framework, familiar to Windows and XBox360 developers, is offered.

The fun began with the demonstration of new things. The first such thing was the AP content reader application. The application allows you to read news, comment, view images and videos.





The application running receives notifications of hot news.



There is no screenshot, but the application is very cool monetized: at some point, an animation appears and an advertisement that is not interfering with navigation is shown. This time Ford. This is a demonstration of how you can make money on free applications for Windows Phone 7.

After the mobile version of AP, they showed the second application - it turned out to be a personal diary with the ability to record, attach pictures and all that stuff. A simple but very nice application.



Next new feature is Windows Phone. This time related to images. Windows Phone 7 has the ability to use third-party image editing providers! That is, you write a certain plugin and Windows Phone consistently uses it to perform some actions with the image of the user. The user thus gets the opportunity to expand his phone to the level of a mega-editor.

Below: a list of providers, the Colorizer provider is selected, which leaves in the photo in color only those parts that the user specified. The image can be scaled using multitouch and naturally draw directly on it at any scale.

Games!

Of course the games on WP7 were shown. The game Harvester in full 3D with a collapsing environment and achievements (pictures are not reinforced, but they are in this post on Habré).

It's time to build the first apps for Windows Phone 7!

Scott Guthrie opens the project in Visual Studio 2010 Express to create an application for WP7. And in just a few minutes it creates a Twitter client. Hall applauds! Tools for creating applications in WP7 simply have no analogues in their capabilities for creating design and developing applications. The free version of VS2010 Express contains a full-fledged device emulator. You do not pay for anything, write the code, develop the design, create your applications for FREE!



The second application was built using another tool - Expression Blend 4. A rich application for working with the image catalog was created from scratch in 8 minutes! Something!



In conclusion, it was once again said: the full package of applications for the full development of programs for Windows Phone 7 will be delivered free of charge.

Multimedia features Windows Phone 7

Then Netflix came on stage and it became clear that this is EPIC WIN! Yes, Netfilx users will be able to download, stream, view music, movies, TV shows and other content directly on Windows Phone 7. Russia is not very concerned, but in the US it is a killer feature.



Further more. Together with a partner Marvel launched the official application to view the comics of this company. Technology DeepZoom here used to the fullest. In the presence of integration with twitter.



We go further. Location and map location support is a popular Foursquare app.



Further. Support music service SHAZAM. The program of football support Major League Soccer with a demonstration of notifications. The job of noticing a change in a football match was demonstrated, while the speaker was working with something else. After that, the speaker clicked on the notification window and immediately went to the background football app.



Accelerometer Further. Demonstration of software and creating software to work with him. On the example of Ballmer, which by the way this time was not. A small application Marionette is a demonstration of the accelerometer in Windows Phone 7.



Next came the Seesmic representative. Of course, without its software on the platform will not do. Wait for the next beautiful twitter client. In addition, Silverlight-client for the desktop, which works under MacOS! And all thanks to the Silverlight cross-platform.





At the end of the opening of the conference, a gun was rolled out onto the scenes, which was controlled using Windows Phone 7. It is believed that the gun is aimed at Apple.

Games, games, XNA!

Yes. Windows Phone 7 fully supports the XNA platform for creating games and other applications. Now the developer can create one code immediately under the three (!) Hardware platforms: Windows, XBox360 and Windows Phone (as well as the iPhone, using XNATouch!). This is once again shown on the presentation. Profit mass, convenience of the sea, the costs are low. Developers will be happy.

Marketplace

The main news is the availability of the Try button! You can try applications before purchasing them.

When? NOW!

When can you start working with the platform? Make an application? Invest time in learning? Create applications for massive phone output? Yes. Right now! Download powerful full tools for free. Low threshold of entry, convenience, speed of development. All this is your success.

Don't you know Silverlight and C # yet?

Start learning. It's free.

The mobile future is here. By August and the end of the year, when the first devices come out, you can manage to write your own unique, cool programs and earn money from them.

Tomorrow, at the same time (19-00 Moscow time), second keynotes. We'll be told about IE9 and web development. Stay in touch. Watch live on http://live.visitmix.com/

After show

This article was written immediately after the keynote of the first day of the conference. From this moment and before the publication on Habré a lot of new details and news appeared. I suggest you familiarize yourself with them:

• Silverlight for Symbian (Nokia S60 5th Edition) officially launched ! And this is not some kind of hoax or a stripped-down version, but full support for application development. First applications: Bing and Seesmic's twitter client on a new platform is already on the way;

• the first device on Windows Phone 7 from Samsung was demonstrated and its characteristics were announced: support for DirectX 9 GPU accelerator in stock;
• The processes of calls, creating messages and synchronization on Windows Phone 7 were shown ;
• The Visual Studio 2010 Express page for WP7 is open.
• in the best tradition of supporting the Microsoft developer community, the Silverlight 4 Training and Windows Phone 7 Training Kits have become available;
• launched a portal for developers and announced the price of participation in the app store;
• official explanation of the work of the application store;
• developers who will place their applications in the Marketplace will receive 70% of the sale of applications;
• announced that student developers will get free access to the Windows Phone 7 application store for application development!
• available free book from Charles Petzold (!) Programming Windows Phone 7 Series!
• from developers there was information about changes in Silverlight 4 RC;
• the first third-party open source example of an application under Windows Phone 7 has appeared!
• several answers to additional questions about Windows Phone 7, for example, about multitasking;
• quietly and quietly released Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office.

This is all for now. If you have something to add - write in the comments.