About a week ago I attend the 20^th Tech-Ed(http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012); it was my 13^th. Tech-Ed is the premier Microsoft conference for developers and It professionals. Since my trip to Tech-Ed Microsoft made a number of important announces, which I will sum up along with observations of Tech-Ed.   

Just prior to Tech-Ed Microsoft made a big announce about Windows Azure, which continue at Tech-Ed. I have to admit that their announcement made Windows Azure more appealing to me. In fact so much so that I have actually deployed a DotNetNuke Site in Azure using Sql Azure. They really expanded Azure and I think everyone needs to take another look at it.

The biggest announcement, for me, was that Lightswich will be generating HTLM5, javascript and CSS and not just Silverlight, This is big for me because now my Lightswich applications will be able run on an Ipad.

Other things of note at Tech-Ed: they showed Office (Excel) running on an arm device; new T-Sql commands in SQL Server 2012 very impressive (you can try them out at http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/learning-center/virtual-labs.aspx); TFS Service (http://tfspreview.com/) being open to every one (I have been using for a couple of month and very happy with it); the new Web Site in Azure (up to 10 free for a year); Infrastructure as a service in Windows Azure; new feature in Visual Studio 2012; and of course Windows 8.

Just days after Tech-Ed, Microsoft announce their new Surface Arm device, which I believe to be a real challenge to the IPad. The device will be made by Microsoft, taking a page out of it Xbox360 book (http://www.microsoft.com/surface ).

The next day at the Windows Phone Summit Microsoft (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Windows-Phone/Summit ) announce a change of direction with windows phone 8. It will use the same kernel as windows 8, this means that I can very easily make a companion application for the one I am developing on Windows 8 for the phone.

The second day of MIX10 started with a Keynote. The day two keynote stated with the IE team. One of the main things they demonstrated is IE9 working with HTML5. Showing how IE9 with the new Window7 hardware can take advantage to it for better performance especially with video.  

The Gu was back again for the second day taking about The improvements in ASP.NET 4.0, ASP.NET MVC 2.0.

We then saw great demos with Odata using the new Netflix feed.

To finish up the keynote was Bill Buxton who did a great talk on Natural User Interfaces.

My first session of the day was “OData: There's a Feed for That”. This session talked about how “OData” started at MIX07 with a session on Project Astoria, It then became ADO.NET Data Services with Visual Studio 2008. This session show using “Odata” in Excel 2010 with the power pivot plug-in. They also demonstrated converting Sharepoint 2010 List into an OData feed.

My next session was “Developing with WCF RIA Services Quickly and Effectively”. This was favorite session of the day. They showed some very good real world examples for using RIA services. Show how to use the MVVM pattern; demonstrated using authorization; doing validations. The best part for me was when he demonstrated RIA service on the windows phone.

My last session of the data was “Implementing OData: How to Create a Feed for That”. He started off showing Pivot on top of “Odata”. The demonstration how you control your data that you expose as an “Odata” feed.

This is my fourth MIX conference, missing the first one. This is the first sold out MIX. The excitement is all due to the Window Phone announcement.  

The day started out as all MIX conferences (actually all conferences) does with the keynote. Scott Gu gave the first day keynote as he has done in all of the MIX conferences I have been at. His first bit of news was SilverLight 4 RC is now available. The best part of this announcement was that we can build SilverLight 4 applications with Visual Studio 2010 RC. This was not a surprise but what I had expected and would have been disappoint if not been release today.

But the star of the keynote was Windows Phone. They demonstrated the new platform; the ease of building compelling applications. This platform uses silverLight and/or the XNA framework. They showed how you can build an application that runs on the PC, Zune, Xbox and the new Windows Phone platform. The real beauty of this is that any .Net developer can start doing this today. Of course the tools for Windows Phone development are available now.

My session of the day was “Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform”. In the session they took the “NerdDinner” ASP.Net MVC sample and changed it to a more compelling application using iCal, Open Auth, Odata, bolg flairs, etc. Look at the code at http://www.codeplex.com/site/search?projectSearchText=nerddinner.

My last session of the day was “Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel Pattern”. This session did give me a better understanding of the MVVM pattern. The speaker had created a framework to help with creating MVVM applications. He talks about how this pattern is good for SilverLight applications. His focus was building the view part of the application in Blend.