Wednesday, 5 December 2007

MIX@MMU Review

MIX @ MMU was a great event, with great presentations from our gueset speakers Phil Winstanley and Mike Taulty.

I started the event out with a present about the Imagine Cup, going through what is involved in the Imagine Cup and the various prizes that are up for grabs, from a trip to Redmond working with the Popfly team to the pile of Xbox 360s that Microsoft are giving away.

To register your interest in the Imagine Cup go to:


Remember just registering your intrest will enter you into a prize draw to win an Xbox 360 Elite every month (Not bad for 2 minutes of your time).
The slides that I used in the presentation can be found on my Skydive account, feel free to download them:



Phil Winistanley then went on to talk about developing websites using ASP.NET. Some of the topics that Phil covered were:

  • A comparison of C# to Java
  • Overview of the .NET framework and the languages supported
  • Master pages and CSS to build up a consistent theme throughout the project
  • Controls with back end functionality (Imagebutton that fired an event)
  • Implementing AJAX into your ASP.NET pages
  • Login and user creation components that are supplied with ASP.NET
  • Rich video, using the forthcoming ASP.NET 3.5 Framework

During his talk Phil mentioned Visual Studio Express Edition which can be downloaded from the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

This comes with the .NET Developer Server, which is used instead of such things as the TomCat server which you may be more familar.



Phils talk ended with rich content in a website which was an ideal starting point for Mikes Silverlight demo. Mike covered a wide range of topics:

  • Silverlight & XAML Introduction
  • Silverlight V1.0 (current build)
  • Silverlight V2.0 (future release)
  • Rich Interactive Media, showing the Silverlight Airways and the Fox Film site
  • cross platform capabilities
  • developing Silverlight with JavaScript and the .NET Framework
  • Expression Studio, for creating XAML

There are various ways of creating XAML but by far the best is by using Microsofts Expression Suite which is a family of programs (Design, Blend, Web and Media) which come togther to allow designers and developers to create rich web content. Trials of the Expression Suite can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

All in all the event was a great success, even with my it being my first public presentation. I would like to once again thank all those of you who turned up and a special thanks to Mike and Phil for giving some great presentations.

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