David Crow

Connector of dots. Maker of lines. Rider of slopes.

Microsoft

Improving the mobile browser

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choiceandflexibility

The latest set of announcements at PDC have focused on improving the end user and developer user experiences. Windows 7 is a continued evolution of the desktop user experience. Internet Explorer 8 is a web standards compliant browser.

There is a gaping hole in the browser on Windows Mobile. 

skyfire-betaWhy does a browser on mobile matter? Look at the Rogers market share this past quarter as a result of the iPhone. Is it phone bling? Definitely. But it is also a device that has a desktop class web browser.

Skyfire announced their open beta today. It boasts an impressive set of features including:

  • New Super Bar that combines search and URL entry into one bar
  • Skyfire can now be set as the default browser
  • New search bar on the Homescreen
  • New start page redesign
  • Faster start-up and page loading times
  • Share a link via SMS
  • Invite friends to download Skyfire via SMS
  • Save an image
  • Download files

And the best part is that Skyfire also supports Flash video on Windows Mobile. The web is the primary distribution channel for content, wether your on a mobile phone, a custom application or dedicated device. The richness of the experience can be improved (see LukeW’s summary of Mix07 Beyond the Browser). And it’s great to see a desktop class browsing experience come to Windows Mobile.

Give customers choice

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Mark Relph has been talking about Choice and Flexibility (part 2) for customers. Today with the announcement of Windows Azure you can start to see how Microsoft is trying to offer the rich user experience choices and the choice of infrastructure, on premises or in the cloud, for developers, IT Pros and ultimately consumers.

choiceandflexibility

What you get is the opportunity to figure out what is right for you, your developers, your organization, your customers and your applications. The goal is to provide designers and developers a common set of Services that can be mixed an matched. If your a startup, you can decide to keep your application, infrastructure and services in the cloud leveraging the ability to instantly scale your applications and manage your costs. If you are an existing company with a large IT investment, you can leverage your existing corporate infrastructure layering in the pieces that allow you to grow or reduce your costs through the economies of scale offered by the cloud services.

You can start see the applications and tools that Microsoft has been shipping in context. Internet Explorer 8 is a tool for accessing software in the cloud. Silverlight 2 is a way for designers and developers to create compelling rich Internet applications. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a powerful environment for desktop software development. As developers you get a shared set of tools (Web Standards, Javascript, JQuery, .NET, XAML, C#, VisualStudio 2008) that can be used to build applications and services.

choiceandflexibility-startups 

Developers can begin to build solutions that fit the needs of their audience. It is about being able to build the right solution for your company, your audience, and your market using the appropriate tools and technologies. ProductWiki is building a web service for open product reviews. Me.dium is building a shared social browsing experience. ThoughtFarmer is enterprise collaboration tool that lives behind the firewall. Xobni is mail analytics and improved communications integrated in Outlook.

servicesPlatform

It’s about choice. The choice of device. The choice of user experience. The choice that fits your business and your customers. It’s about the flexibility of the platform to grow and evolve as you do.

PDC kicks off tomorrow

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Getting ready to head to LA for Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (which begs the question as a non-professional developer what am I doing at PDC?). I’m preparing for a week of some in depth Microsoft experiences and announcements. Next to the coffee or the bourbon, the keynotes are the best part of a conference. I’m expecting big things from Ozzie, Scott Guthrie, Steven Sinofsky, and Don Box.

I love the layout of the Timeline application. It’s a great way to access details about each session and build a personal schedule. A higher resolution monitor (I’m running at 1280 x 800) would have meant a little less scrolling, but generally a good experience. Here are some of the sessions out side of the keynotes I’m looking forward to.

  • The Future of C# presented by Anders Hejlsberg
  • A Lap around "Oslo" presented by Douglas Purdy, Vijaye Raji
  • Windows 7: Design Principles for Windows 7 presented by Samuel Moreau
  • Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit presented by Karsten Januszewski
  • Office Business Applications: Enhanced Deployment presented by Saurabh Bhatia, Andrew Whitechapel
  • Developing for Microsoft Surface presented by Brad Carpenter, Robert Levy

It’s great to see sessions by the Mono team. Having spent a couple of days hanging out with Geoff Norton at FSOSS in Toronto.  I am blown away by the work that is going on by the Novell team and the Silverlight team to build a new cross-browser, cross-platform runtime. They are building some great tools.

This will be my first deeply Microsoft conference. Yes, I’ve attended the internal events, but I’m really interested in observing and participating with the folks that build Windows applications, applications for the web on the Microsoft platform and learning more about their experiences.

Mix09 <3 Your Web

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PDC is less than a week away, and it appears that the Mix team is busy announcing plans for Mix09 in Vegas.

MIX09Logo

Agenda & Speakers

There is a great list of the usual suspects and the some new faces including:

Restyle & 10k Smart Coding Challenge

restyle_logo_rev

Do you hate the style of the Mix site? Change it. Use your own CSS and images to ReStyle the Mix homepage. This is a great opportunity for local web designers to create a new experience. 

TenKLogoDownload

Inspire the world with just 10k of code.  It reminds me of Stuart Butterfield’s 5k competition. It’s a great chance to win a conference pass, hotel accommodations and a gift card (money) for time in your Vegas.

What could you create for the Web if you only had 10 kilobytes of code? It’s time to exercise your minimalist creativity and get back to basics – back to optimizing every little byte like your life depended on it.

 

Both of these challenges have the same prize:

One winner will receive a pass to MIX09, hotel accommodations and a Visa gift card. Other great prizes are to be announced. Official entry requirements, procedures, rules and restrictions coming in November.

What: Mix09
When: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (all day)
Where: The Venetian Hotel

Las Vegas, NV   USA

Moving mountains

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techdays-2008Mark and the Community Team at Microsoft Canada have been working hard on TechDays.This is the first attempt to move beyond a marketing event. Though you might not get that from the web site. It is a shift from Microsoft speakers standing on the stage with new product announcements and walkthroughs to sharing the stage with non-Microsoft employees showing examples of solutions they’ve built to solve problems (in big companies, small companies, as individuals, etc.).

What is TechDays?

TechDays is a career-development event for developers, IT professionals and IT managers with a focus on the Microsoft platform.

It’s hard out here…

This event is a big change for Microsoft. It represents a shift from marketing and product launch events to a focus on software development and IT as a profession. The goal is to focus on career development of professional and practical developers. To give real-world developers an opportunity to share their stories and experiences with attendees. To provide a public forum to celebrate the people making a difference to their companies, to their communities and to people.

techdays-speakersThe biggest change is that the content is not going to be Microsoft presenters doing Microsoft demos and product launches. It’s probably not obvious from looking at the speakers page, but 90% of the content is being delivered by non-Microsoft employees. The first seven people listed on the Speakers page are all Microsoft Canada employees. 

Once you scroll past the usual suspects, you’ll find a group of Microsoft friendly people from other companies. Consultancies. Big corporations. Smaller companies. Client side. It includes MVPs like Colin Bowern, Mark Arteaga, Laurent Duveau, and Barry Gervin. And others like Robert Burke and Ken Cox. Sure lots of these speakers are MVPs, it means that they are “exceptional technical community leaders”. They are experts. They write books. They blog. They consult. They build things in the real world.

Baby steps

I think it is courageous of the team to take a chance, they are having to battle internal forces that are resistant to change. They are making a bet that developers and IT professionals in Canada on the Microsoft stack want something more than canned demos and pitches. The bet is that professional development involves hearing from others in the community. About sharing their stories of the trials, tribulations and learnings to make help make others better developers. Yes, it’s about the Microsoft developers.

It is a step in the right direction. I hope that people will support the changes, because it will make the next set of changes easier to get support for.

If you are a Microsoft developer, IT professional or IT manager, then TechDays is attempting to bring the best of Canadian Microsoft community to you in 7 different locations including Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax and Winnipeg. Check out the Mark Relph’s Letter to your Manager if you need help generating support.

Countdown to PDC

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Countdown to PDC 2008: This is the Software + Services PDC, Plus a Hard Drive Chock Full o’Bits is a PDC Attendee’s Dream Come True!

Apparently there are all sorts of interesting bits being given away at PDC 2008 to developers. All developers will be getting a 160Gb external USB2 drive full of content. Mike doesn’t provide the details of what will be available on the drive, but you could guess based on Mike’s post that it will contain:

I’ve never been to a PDC. For that matter, I think the last big developer focused conference outside of the O’Reilly conferences that I’ve attended was JavaOne back in 2000. I have heard great things from people that attended PDC in 2005. There will also be the introduction of the Software+Services platform. There have already been parts of the platform available including SSDS, Office Live, Dev Live, and LiveMesh. It should be a very interesting few days.

Register for PDC 2008