As you can probably tell from the title Tim and I are on the plane on our way back to Gatwick. After the first update of day ones activities, posting a blog entry after getting back to the hotel has been the last thing on my mind. Getting some sleep has been the first! I now know why a lot of people say these conferences are hard work. 15 hour days of presentations and the networking opportunities in the evening is tough going. That’s not to say I won’t be wanting to go to the next one that I’m given the chance to attend!
A lot of other people have been doing a great job of blogging about the event anyway, one of them being Chris Green the technical editor from Computing magazine. He interviewed Tim and I on Tuesday evening about what we did, what we thought of the conference and topics and the direction Microsoft are going in with the Live platform, Atlas, and Vista. It was pretty nerve wracking being interviewed. Chris didn’t say whether he’d use it completely unedited, or even at all, but if it does go up I’ll post a link to it.
One of the nicest guys we met, and who we hung around with nearly all conference was Omar Al Zabir (you gotta check out his cool site). He runs his own consultancy business and also the site Page Flakes. Tim met him on the plane between Newark and Las Vegas, and luckily we met up again during the first session on Monday. He’s written some great msdn articles and some cool open source applications. Hearing him talk about the application code he’s made available I’ve decided to put up the code I wrote for Pocket Blogger. Although nowhere near the standard of Omars projects someone may decide to use it or extend the application further. I sure hope so as there were lots of things I meant to do with the project but have never taken on, one of which being a port to use on a smart phone. I’ll get the code sorted over the weekend and posted up somewhere.
As I previously mentioned meeting Alex Barnett was cool (he’s got a pic of me on his blog!). It was a little weird though as we kept going to exactly the same sessions. I had to reassure him that I wasn’t following him and we must just be interested in the same things! I also got to show him the work I’ve been doing around attention data and he was pretty impressed. Also demo’d to Marc Canter and Kim Cameron. They were also both impressed and although I’d love to tell you a little more about it now, all will be revealed in due course! The fact that these three guys were excited about what we’re doing though is a very good sign. I was a bit nervous about meeting all these people whose blogs I’ve been reading for ages but once you start talking to them you realise they are human, friendly, and most of all like talking to people who are interested in the same things they are.
Other sessions to note were all the ones on Infocard, and the one on running your content driven website on SharePoint 2007. I thought the SharePoint session would be empty, but it was very well attended and I was very impressed that it was the session that had the most question from the audience. I guess this is because all the server components for Office 2007 have been under NDA and this is the first chance many have got to see them, but it was still good to see. With more info being made public about SharePoint 2007 now I should hopefully be able to blog about my experiences of using it and developing against it. I got up and asked a quick question about licencing for public facing SharePoint sites but unfortunately Jackie Bodine didn’t know the answer. It also gave me a chance to mention the SharePoint User Group UK to the audience for anyone based over in Britain. I managed to link to that site in nearly everyone of my blog posts!
The final mention of sessions I’ll give to was the Microsoft Research one. I went here not expecting much, but in the end was completely blown away. The imaging work the MS is doing, and social software is amazing. Going to get back to the UK and check out the Research site as there are lots of things to download and try out. Brian Mistele from Inrix spoke about Microsofts traffic technology that they have licenced and built a product around which was of particular interest to us after we did the mashup with the BBC traffic data and Local.Live.com.
Mix06 finished on Wednesday lunch time which gave Tim, Omar and myself a chance to drive around Las Vegas. We got on a straight road and drove until the road finished in a new housing development. We felt like we were very close to the mountains and could walk to them in about 5 minutes although in reality they were still miles away. On the drive back we stopped off at CompUSA to see if we could buy a cheap Tablet PC. Tims keen to get one, and I could have been persuaded, but unfortunately they only had a HP version that wasn’t powerful enough to do any development work on. According to a Tablet PC user I spoke to at the conference most US users purchase their online, which it looks like we’ll have to do back in the UK. If anybody spots any bargains out there please let us know! We saw a sony viao that was so cheap and such good specs that Tim nearly bought it, we needed to remind ourselves though that it was a Tablet PC we were after!
In terms of networking at Mix06 I think the event for us was a great success. We’ve got a stack of business cards to follow up on. If anybody from Mix06 is over in the UK anytime make sure you look us up. We’ll be happy to give you a tour of Windsor and show you the cool kinds of things we are working on.
Longest blog post ever……you can tell I’m on a plane with nothing else to do!
Final update : back home now and trying to get back to UK time zone!
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