Although I won't be attending MIX '06 this week, I am interested in what people think of some of the announcements that will be made around building Web platforms with Microsoft technologies and various Windows Live announcements this week. I am also surprised to see that a bunch of talks are from external folks from companies like Yahoo! and Amazon which is nice.
Some of the sessions I'd attend if I was in Las Vegas would be
Speaker(s): Scott Isaacs
Explore
the challenges and lessons learned developing the Windows Live and
Gadgets Web client frameworks powering Windows Live, Hotmail (Kahuna
beta), Spaces, and more. This technical talk presents design and
architectural considerations for building interactive AJAX-like sites.
See how componentization, network management, accessibility, page
composition, and more impact the design and engineering of your Web
application.
Speaker(s): Brian Arbogast, Ken Levy
Windows
Live provides unique opportunities for developers from hobbyists to
large ISVs to build social networking applications on top of the
largest contact and address book database on the Internet. Developers
can build these applications utilizing Windows Live services such as
instant messaging, search, location based mapping, blogging, gadgets,
and others. These can be AJAX style Web applications, run within
Messenger or other rich applications. The Windows Live Platform
provides several business models based on revenue sharing and paid
placement. Brian Arbogast, Vice President of the Windows Live Platform,
discusses and demonstrates the latest developments of the Windows Live
platform.
Speaker(s): Doug Purdy, Clemens Vasters
Your
site is more than a collection of pages; it's a programmable platform
that your users are leveraging in innovative new ways. Scraping,
mashups, and RSS mean that your site is already a service, and the
fastest, most flexible way to build that service is with Windows
Communication Foundation (WCF). With WCF you can expose your site over
a whole host of different transports and formats, ensuring that clients
of all kinds can access your content. Use WCF to take your site to the
next level and provide an optimized experience for all of your users.
DIS004 - Beyond the Banner: Advertising on the Web and Where It’s GoingSpeaker(s): Ron Belanger (Yahoo!), Bant Breen (Interpublic Group), David Jakubowski, Jeff Lanctot (Avenue A), Jed Nahum, Jason Rapp (New York Times), Jennifer Slegg (JenStar)
Advertising
revenues in traditional venues like print magazines and television are
declining, while online advertising is exploding. Advertisers want
richer online ad platforms. Content providers want ads that maximize
revenue without negatively impacting the user experience. What role
will advertising play in "podcasting," "video blogging" and other
emerging media? Join a panel of industry luminaries to discuss these
and other issues.
Speaker(s): Jeff Barr (Amazon)
Amazon
subsidiary Alexa.com is leveling the search playing field. For the
first time, developers looking to build the next "big thing" in search
or an ultra custom search engine have access to the 300 terabytes of
Alexa crawl data, along with the utilities to search, process, and
publish their own custom subset of the data-all at a reasonable price.
Developers no longer need a million dollar budget or to reinvent the
wheel designing search algorithms, to be able to build their own search
engines or create customized Web services based on data from the Alexa
crawl. As a full-service Web analysis and Web service publication
platform, the Alexa Web Search Platform should allow any user with an
Internet connection to access Web content on a large scale and provide
new services or applications to the online community. Jeff Barr
provides an overview of the Alexa API and shows developers and
designers how to get on the new, leveled search playing field.
Speaker(s): Jeffrey McManus (Yahoo!)
Yahoo!
is opening up to developers using Web services. Today our services
enable developers to access Yahoo! properties as diverse as Web search,
maps, Flickr, comparison shopping, and many more -- and we're making
more available all the time. In this session you'll learn how you can
incorporate Yahoo! Web services in your application or Web site, and
see a demonstration of integration between Yahoo! Web Services, the new
Yahoo! Presentation Library, and ASP.NET "Atlas".
Focus(s): Architect, Developer
Session Type(s): Hands-On Lab
In this lab, you'll create a gadget that mashes up concert event info from podbop.org with images from flickr.com
Speaker(s): Alex Daley
As
content and services are delivered to customers in more locations, on
more devices, users are expecting information to be more tailored to
their context and more relevant not to just "what" they are looking
for, but "where". Microsoft's Alex Daley hosts this session exploring
ways to reach customers with location relevant information, building
richer experiences that make your site or application more "sticky" and
fulfilling for users. Alex covers using Microsoft's Virtual Earth
development technologies to build applications from store locators to
location-based social networking to customized vertical search
experiences.
BTB025 - Developing Interactive Applications Using Windows Live Robots, Activities, and Alerts
Speaker(s): Pierre Berkaloff (Conversagent), Campbell Gunn, John Kim (Conversagent)
Learn
how to create rich and deeply integrated applications leveraging the
200 million worldwide Windows Live Messenger users. Windows Live
Messenger offers a unique platform for building applications that
provide a shared experience, such as joint shopping, multi-user gaming,
customer support, and more. Windows Live Messenger applications can use
a combination of features including BOTS, Alerts, and Activities (which
is the application window within Messenger), as well as social
networking. Learn about the business opportunities exposed by the
Windows Live Messenger platform and details on how to build
applications that capitalize on these opportunities.
Speaker(s): Brad Abrams, Rick Spencer
This
session explores best practices for designers and developers who are
tackling the real challenges of building AJAX-style user experiences on
the Web. Explore a few key principles that are the hallmark of the
modern web from developers on the Microsoft Live and "Atlas" teams.
These principles will be illustrated with real-world examples from the
Windows Live Local and you will learn how they are easy to leverage
with Atlas. Discover how the "Atlas" controls and components remove the
complexity from designing rich, interactive experiences, and help you
build AJAX-style applications more quickly.
Speaker(s): Garrett Serack
"InfoCard"
can bring a new level of security to authenticating users to your site.
In this session, take a deep developer look at how this can be
achieved. A traditional forms-based authentication implementation is
converted to use InfoCard, along with explanations of the Web services,
protocols, and security considerations that one needs to understand.
Speaker(s): David Jakubowski, Jed Nahum
adCenter
is the next generation of online advertising that will allow you to
conveniently plan, execute, and adjust your online advertising
programs. Get the insider view of our current search advertising pilot
in the U.S., and a preview of the innovations we're testing at the
Microsoft adLabs.
Definitely a diverse set of talks. Check them out and let me know what you learned.