Notes from the MIX Conference Day 2 Keynote:

Internet Explorer 9, HTML 5, Hardware Acceleration

>> Download IE9 beta at www.ietestdrive.com

• Presenting: Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Microsoft
• HTML 5 will make experiences feel like real apps rather than Web pages
• Key takeaways: IE9 will hardware accelerate HTML 5 through the GPU and taking advantage of multiple cores
• IE8 the most used browser on the Web
• IE6 had a funeral last week (oddly, the mirror effect shows a 9 <grin>)
• Showing IE9s Sunspider performance, and it’s a lot better than IE9
• Making Javascript faster: Compiled JavaScript, compiled in the background, take advantage of multi-core by compiling on a separate core than the browser’s core affinity
• addEventListener() is now in IE9.
• IE9 passed CSS3 selectors test 100%. (578 of 578 tests)
• Doing a demo of IE9, Firefox, Chrome CSS rendering.
• Announcement: Microsoft will now be contributing DOM, CSS3 Standards Compliance Tests to W3C. Over 100 test cases submitted to help designers address these issues across browsers.
• Demoing GPU-Powered HTML5, presented by Steve Sinofsky (sp?), President of Windows division
• Very cool how fast it is.
• They’re showing Clippy, rendered in SVG. Cool. Bummer – they’re not animating his eyes, but okay, I’m still cool with it 🙂
• Using DirectWrite to do subpixel rendering and ClearType
• Announcement: Hardware-accelerated SVG, and contributing SVG Standards Compliance Tests to W3C
• Announcement: Platform preview available for download today. Updating the preview "about every 8 weeks.”
• The preview does not have phishing protection, but it does have developer tools. So, remember this is a preview, and not for general consumer use / main browser use yet 🙂
• HTML5 Video demo of YouTube HTML 5 demo.
• Showing a Windows 7 Netbook with hardware video decoding. Showed Chrome playing HTML 5 HD video (720p). CPU, both cores, 100%, trying to decode video. Lots of frame dropping.
• Now showing same in IE9 – works with practically no dropped frames, and looks pretty good, and CPU hovering around 40%.
• They scrolled down and showed multiple HD videos running at the same time. Very cool. Note that video was 4 megabits/second.
• Demo: Video Carousel
• In Chrome it’s pretty slow, but still somewhat performant
• In IE9, it looks much better, has full opacity, and plays very smoothly
• PC Hardware + Windows for a better browsing experience – that’s what they’re pushing.
• Note: The code name for IE9 was Chakra
• Call to action: GET OFF IE6! PLEASE!

Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4 Improvements

• Scott Guthrie Presenting
• Smaller viewstate (yahoo!)
• Many of these things are not new news – but VS2010 and ASP.NET 4 will be great
• Semantic URLs supported out of the box
• New UI and Scaffolding Helpers
• Ajax development significantly improved
• JQuery intellisense and much more intellisense Javascribe support
• Store multiple configuration settings for different environments (yay!)
• Database deployment now also built-in for publishing sites
• Scott Hanselman, principal Program Manager, Microsoft, demoing the product
• Intellisense no longer requires you to use the beginning of a word – you can use just a piece, or camel casing. So, if you’re looking for HttpCatchException, you can just type cache or HCP. Cool!
• Client-side databinding expressions such as {% if (Stock < 5 %} – for example, when you’re consuming a JSON data source on the client side
• The database schema and scripting publish feature is just way cool.

Improving JQuery

• Announcement: Microsoft will be contributing code to the JQuery effort.
• Bringing John Resig, Creator of JQuery, on stage.
• JQuery has a 30% market share.

Web Platform Installer

• More than 10 million downloads in the past 12 months.
• The Orchard Product – lightweight CMS and blogging engine, fully open source.

WebsiteSpark and BizSpark Programs

• Microsoft WebsiteSpark and BizSpark – no cost, no obligation Web site launching solution. WebsiteSpark gives developers Visual Studio, Expression Studio, and other software, including 2 server licenses, for independent contractors and small businesses with 10 or fewer employees. Pretty cool.
• Michael Comperda, Director of Technology at Curse, on stage (Web gaming company)
• Before BizSpark they used LAMP is things were terrible

More downloads available at http://microsoft.com/web

Services Powering Experiences

• Doug Purdy, Microsoft
• Everyone at Microsoft loves Twitter
• Open Data Protocol for those who understand ATOM and ATOM Hub
• Announcing Netflix is using OData
• Uses SQL Azure.
• Expression language entirely in URL, no other code necessary – neat-o
• Announcement: Support for OData on iPhone.
• Every SharePoint 2010 list is an OData feed.
• OData support will be available via Excel 2010 using PowerPivot.
• Many OData feeds coming in other Microsoft products, inclduing jQuery, Acure, SQL Acure, Server 2008, Silverlight, Dallas, Windows Phone 7 Series, Dynamics, PHP, SQL 2008, Restlet.
• Announcement: Releasing .NET OData under the Apache 2 License.
• :Lots of partners.
• More information at http://www.odata.org.
• Announcing Project Houston: Web-based method to builld databases inside a Web browser using Silverlight.
• Automatic OData service for any SQL Azure database.
• Uploading to SQL Azure Labs (www.sqlazurelabs.com) to build OData service instantly, no code.

Codename Dallas – Monetizing Your API

• Bring your API to Dallas for others to mash up
• Showing Dallas catalog and app they built that uses what they’ve shown today
• www.sqlazureservices.com to view this
• Azure Catalog available at www.sqlazureservices.com/catalog.aspx

Question: Has anyone else noticed they’re not mentioning Android or Google at all during these keynotes? They’re mentioning the Pre and even Apple, but no Google properties… interesting.