There are two new features that Microsoft is announcing the Beta1 version of Internet Explorer 8.  These two new features are Activities and WebSlices, as mentioned in the keynote. 

Activities

• XML installed to the browser using the OpenService Format
• There are a few simple components that make up an activity – Category, Context, Execute, and Preview
• Category – This is a way to group the different Activities you add – in this example, it is Maps
• Context – text that shows up in the context menu, context is typically “selection”, which will use the text that you have highlighted
• Execute – the actual URL that will be launched, with {selection} in curly brackets to dynamically pass the selection
• Preview – setting this will allow for a mouseover preview – action is a URL, requires parameters for size and selection

WebSlices

• Little purple button letting user know you can subscribe to the WebSlice
• An item is added to the favorites bar
• This can be eBay items, Facebook friends, Stumbleupon, NY Times most emailed articles, etc.
• WebSlices is based on hAtom Microformats
• These are implemented using style classes – some from hAtom (entity-title, entity-content), some are new (hslice)
• You must have a unique ID on an hslice
• Leverages and expands the Windows Feeds Platform shipped with IE7
• Also takes advantage of improved links bar – bold is updated, italics is expiring soon, and gray is expired
• Converts WebSlices into an Atom Feed
• Update schedule in the browser from once a day to every 15 minutes
• Use the TTL  class type to determine time-to-live that will be respected
• You can also define alternative feed URLs, and an end time
• The hover behaviors can be hidden to prevent hover behavior conflicts.  If you do this, it is easy to add a button that will add the WebSlice instead.  The same API can be used for links and feeds.
• If you need a username & password to get to the original content, the WebSlice dialog will ask for it to update the WebSlice
• Feeds should be used for lists of items instead of just a piece of page content

Conclusion

This is a preview of some of the new developer features in IE8.  There will be lots more to come, including new user-centric features.  Based on what I have seen, that should be very exciting stuff too!

This session is to be geared to how Silverlight is used in advertising and media delivery.  Following the last few acquisitions of Microsoft’s, and listening to the keynote, they are going to be focusing on advertising a lot more now and in the future.  With my current focus on Brand sites at BMS, this is a topic of great interest.

Polite Advertising

• Polite advertising is a way of delivering a small banner advertisement, and provide lots more information to the user inline, on demand, when requested. 
• Polite ads should have a fast initial load time and render very quickly
• They should also not block the rest of the page from downloading. 
• Incremental elements should download later, and do so asynchronously
• There are two techniques to polite advertising with Silverlight – Splash Screens, and Xap Loads Xap
• Splash Screen – Static splash screen while larger incremental downloads
• XAP loads XAP – same idea, but you can download other components as needed

Cross Domain Support

• Ads are typically sourced and tracked at different domains from the page content
• The default behavior for servers is to throw an Access Denied error
• By adding Policy files, you allow access to specific domains
• You can use Flash policy files, or Silverlight Specific ones – ClientAccessPolicy.xml

Tracking events

• Silverlight has a rich event model
• You can track activity with mouse interaction, or you can use container state (i.e. size, shape, etc)
• User click-throughs spawn new page, and then send a ping to an ad tracking servers

EyeWonder

• Work with Atlas and DoubleClick
• Leverages their custom InStream Advertising Roadmap workflow
• By providing additional interactivity & tracking in advertising, you gain more information about your customer
• As the add is planned, built, and purchased, EyeWonder ensures the ad fits within the parameters of the host site (ad size, file size, bit rate, etc)

Conclusion

This session provided a lot of new information about the design, development, and deployment of banner advertising, and how it will be impacted by the improvements in Siverlight.  I will probably wind up downloading and watching this session again.

For session 2 I had selected a session on Advanced Search Engine Optimization.  It sounded like the session was right up my alley.  My hopes were high. 

Search Engine – Crawling, Ranking, Finding

Search Engines do three basic things – crawl, rank, and find. 

• Crawling – search engines start with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and follow links from there
• Ranking – Each page is ranked according to certain criteria – inbound links (basically an endorsement of other sites – either high quality, low quality, or links with penalty); outbound links; note that subdomains are treated very differently than subdirectories.
• Searching – simple process – check spelling, determine intent, fulfillment of search request with results, determine results order

Building Pages

• Use HTML Semantically !!
• H1 (SEO good) vs spans & styles (SEO bad)
• A – used for ranking, test in link is important, use something descriptive
• H1 – only 1 per page, most important page topic
• Title – critical for determining keywords, relevance, and page content
• Meta tags – description is what the user will see… without one, the crawler will have to guess at the page’s description based on content
• JavaScript & CSS – don’t use JavaScript navigation, host css externally

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)

• These tend to look like black boxes to the search engines
• Noscript tags are your friend !!
• Validate your HTML – it makes the job of the crawler easier
• 3 types of pages, based on your SEO goals
• Monolithic – like mail.live.com – don’t want it to be searched
• Linkable – bmw.com – each car is a separate page, with a rich experience on that page
• Crawlable – lots of content, all HTML based

HTTP Status Codes

• 200 OK – Page returned just fine without any errors
• 404 Page Not Found – good for customers, bad for search engines – never removes pages from search engines
• 301 Permanent Redirect – instead of throwing the 404, use this for a moved domain, etc.
• 302 Moved Temporarily – confusing to users and to search engines, don’t use this.
• 304 Not Modified – conditional get, only if search engine has latest version,
• 503 Down for Maintenance – great to use if your server will be down temporarily, the crawler knows to come back
• For more, visit W3C for standards for http status codes

Site Evaluation – Mix Site

• Do a search for mix08 – the visitmix.com site is not the top result
• Across the search engines, you get no title, and no description
• Blogs are beating out mix site !
• The site has a JavaScript redirect – BAD!
• 16,000 inbound links to the index.html page, no server side redirect
• 5700 inbound links to the default.aspx page – a lot less
• http://www.visitmix.com vs visitmix.com vs visitmix.com/default.aspx – all 3 are different to the crawlers, choose one option and stick with it, use 301 redirects for other two

Other Notes

• URL Rewriting in asp.net – there is a whitepaper by Scott Guthrie
• Soft 404s (a page that gives content or a redirect to the homepage) is great for users, but bad for search engines.  There is a workaround for soft 404
• Case Matters, particularly for apache, mono, etc.
• There is another whitepaper called How to optimize Silverlight for search – read it!!
• A good idea to make XAML understandable to crawlers is to create XSLT to reflect XAML
• There is a Tools Review slide – we are using most already
• Gatineau – AdSense Analytics – a competitor to Google Analytics (maybe this plays nicer with .Net and Silverlight?)
• Canonicalization of URLs – include www or not, and force a redirect server side to stay consistent
• Cloaking is bad
• Sub-domains do not carry pagerank juice like a directory or subpage will
• Underscores are bad (one word vs multiple, usability), dashes are better

Conclusion

I had high expectations for this session, since its title promised Advanced topics in SEO.  Most of the session was review.  Some of the more interesting things I walked away with were the brief tips on Silverlight, and on the importance of canonicalization of your site. 

There are lots of similarities and lots of differences in the way Silverlight operates as compared to Flash.  This session covers some of those, as well as some of the improvements to Silverlight 2 Beta 1. 

Basics

• In Silverlight 2, all objects now inherit from the userControls base class. 
• In Flash, X and Y are properties, you could create a “ball” object, and get and set X and Y as properties to make it more like Flash
• The Point object is similar to the mouse object in Flash.  Create a Point and call it mouse, and the C# starts to look a lot like ActionScript in Flash.

The Helvetica of Easing Algorithms

• This is a cool and very simple effect that is used regularly in Flash. 
• Using storyboards and the X and Y properties you just created, you can calculate the distance between the click point and an object (a ball, etc), take a percentage(like 12% or 20%), and continually call the storyboard, making the object move across the canvas. 
• Something like ball.X += (ball.X – mouse.X)*.12 , and the same for Y
• The default frame rate for Silverlight is 60 frames per second, as opposed to 40 for Flash

User Controls that Govern Themselves

• Instead of having the storyboards for child objects in the parent class, you can put them right into the user controls. 
• The ability to remove an item is very easy to do in Flash.  It’s a bit more complex in Silverlight.
• You can just remove it from the canvas’s Children collection, but that is a real bad idea for RIA applications that are data intensive!!  You can instead raise an event and bubble it up to the parent, and let the parent handle it. 

One Function to Rule Them All

• You can have a method in the user control that will add behaviors to the objects on the canvas, such as duration, movement, transparency, etc. 
• The presenter ran out of time, and moved the coverage of the rest of this idea into the OpenSpace sessions

Where did my downloader go?

• This is a big difference from Silverlight 1.1
• There used to be great object to get handle on images, etc. called the downloader object
• Now in version 2, you need to create a WebClient stream object and stream it into the Silverlight object
• Or, you can also use the BitmapImage and import it from the local directory

Conclusion

Even though the presenter did not get to cover all the material he wanted to, it was actually a good session to connect some of my Flash experience and .Net experience and blend it into some Silverlight code.

Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie kicked off the Mix08 conference with launch announcements.  New Beta1 versions have been released of Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7, Windows Office Live, SQL Server Data Services, and a New Expression site (expression.microsoft.com), just to name a few.  Ray focused on the impact of Content, Commerce & Community on Microsoft’s strategy.  He discussed the shift to Utility Computing – the iea of Business services to have servers in the Internet Clout that host Exchange, SharePoint, Office Suite, etc. instead of in the data center.  There will be a new focus on software’s impact on advertising, which is very exciting.  Another idea that Ray Ozzie discussed was the Web as a hub.  People will move away from the idea of “My Computer”, and towards a collection of devices that are connected and aware of each other via the web.  Software and services will be more loosely joined, to add reusability.   He discussed 5 different areas of focus – connected devices, connected entertainment, connected productivity, connected business, and connected development. 

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie covered the more technical side of the keynote.  He outlined the topics he would be covering – Standards based web development, and 3 Silverlight topics – UI, TCO, and Monetization.  He also announced a bit of a roadmap for ASP.Net.  New components to come are ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net AJAX, ASP.Net Dynamic Data.  He also announced a new beta release of Microsoft Expression would be available right after the keynote. 

Internet Explorer 8

Dean Hachamovitch gave a demonstration of the new beta version of IE8.  He had a list of 8 things to share about the new IE8:

1. CSS 2.1 – biggest impact from W3C
2. CSS Certification – 702 test cases submitted to the W3C to verify CSS 2.1 for any browser, Microsoft has made these available under the BSD License
3. Performance – more in line with Firefox and Safari – a huge improvement from IE7
4. HTML 5 support – better AJAX support, connection events for page scripting, and DOM storage
5. New Developer Tools – built in script debugging, style tracing, and much more
6. Activities – new extendable in-browser services, using their new OpenService Specification.  Some examples of activities include eBay, StumbleUpon, Google Maps, etc. Just highlight the text, and activate!
7. WebSlices – based on the new WebSlices Specification, users can subscribe to parts of web pages like an Atom feed, and track and preview right in the Favorites bar.
8. Beta 1 available right after keynote – http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

Silverlight 2

Silverlight 2 is a huge improvement from both 1.0 and 1.1.  Here are the comments I furiously recorded during the keynote:

• Silverlight is downloaded 1.5 million times per day
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download !!
• Partnership between Microsoft and Move Networks to implement Adaptive streaming – determine appropriate bit rate to use based on bandwidth and CPU usage, can switch between bit rates on the fly
• Recently launched Windows Media Services 2008 – available free, will run on Windows Server 2008
• IIS 7 Media Pack – ability to set a bit rate throttle per media type
• Multi-language support – JS, VB, C#, Iron Python, Iron Ruby
• Data Mining Support, LINK, data caching
• Rich skinning and styling
• Robust networking support – REST, RSS, Web Services, socket support
• Small Download, Fast Install, 4.3 MB download, 10 seconds to install. 
• Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and you don’t need the .Net Framework
• New higher level controls are available  – sliders, calendar, Data Grid, etc. – open source for you to download (and modify if you want)
• Unit tests for UI and Non-UI functionality in an open source license
• SharePoint extensions to build Silverlight WebParts

Other Demos

Scott Guthrie took the opportunity to bring up a slew of Microsoft partners to give demos of some of the work they were doing:

John Harris – Silverlight Rich Advertising Scenarios

• Added a Silverlight Ad template in Visual Studio
• Video.show – a blueprint on CodePlex for implementing a video content site
• Integration with Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions Atlas AdManager
• Overlay advertising easily on to videos with lots of functionality

Ari Paparo – VP Advertiser Products, DoubleClick

• Integrate DoubleClick’s Instream product with Silverlight
• Define events in advertising to track user experiences and possibly deliver new content for each of them

Perkins Miller – Sr. VP Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics

• Committed to putting 2200 hours of Olympics video online, across 34 sports, for 17 days
• NBCOlympics.com
• Combination of the data and the video
• Ability to do Picture in Picture, Send to a Friend, 4 streams simultaneously when live video
• Commercials are integrated right into the video

Roy Ben-Yoseph and Eric Hoffman from AOL

• Rebuilding their online mail client in Silverlight
• Focus on performance – just make it faster
• Close to 50 million email users
• Functionality is more like a desktop application than a web application
• Demonstrated the plain black & white standard skin and easily change to the Halo 3 video based skin

Sean Dee – VP Chief Marketing Officer – Hard Rock, Scott Stanfield – CEO – Vertigo

• Seadragon Deep Zoom Technology
• Hard Rock is taking their collection to the web – Memorabilia 2.0
• One image is 2 Billion Pixels !!
• Now available on hardrock.com

Marek Reichman – Director of Design – Aston Martin

• Control 3 aspects of the Aston Martin experience – Online, in the Dealership, and Ownership
• Deep Zoom for interior details
• Integration of Web, PC, UMPC, Mobile, and In-Car Computer for an immersive experience

Krista Monson – Head of Casting – Cirque de Soleil

• 6 Resident shows, 9 touring shows, over 3000 employees
• Line of Business HR application – Interviewing prospective performers
• Offline functionality and synchronization
• Review interviews and videos back at the office
• Scott Guthrie doesn’t have a chance as a juggler in Cirque de Soleil

Scott Guthrie – WPF Demo

• Implementation of a Physics Engine
• Complex dynamic changes to images and videos with filters – CPU usage never above 15 to 20%
• Demonstrates the push of work down to the Hardware (i.e. Video Card) instead of CPU usage

Silverlight for Mobile

• Implementation of the same code, assets, skills, and tools for desktop, the Web, and Mobile platforms
• These kind of rich experiences will be everywhere

Darren David – CEO – Stimulant

• Silverlight application called Mixer – Where is the party at?
• Social application for Venues, Friends, and Mood
• Windows Mobile 6 deployed, but written on the desktop

Lee Williams – Senior VP, Nokia

• Nokia will be delivering Silverlight on their phones

Tamir Melamed – VP of Engineering – WeatherBug

• Leading provider of live local weather information – updated locally every 2 secodns
• API available – API.weatherbug.com
• same app on the phone is on the web – silverlight.weatherbug.com
• View the radar, have it animated, hourly forecasts, daily forecasts, alerts
• Add snow to the graphics
• Couldn’t do any of this with Flash Light and have it perform

Wrap-up

This was a jam-packed Keynote, with lots of exciting announcements, great demos, and lots of things to come.  I hope the rest of the conference is this great!.

The Flight

Today I arrived in Las Vegas for the Mix 08 conference. After our airplane had taxied out to the tarmac for takeoff, the pilot informed us that since we were going to Las Vegas, our lucky number for the week would be 34. That was the number of planes in front of us on the tarmac waiting to take off. So we got to wait for an hour while all the traffic ahead of us took off. Ready, set, wait.

The Hotel

Got to the airport and to the Venetian Hotel just fine. Checked in, and the room was just as nice as last year, but they have upgraded it a bit. Everything looked shiny and new, and the CRT televisions were replaced with LCD TVs – three of them. One in the Sitting Room, one in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom (because you have to have a TV in the bathroom). Tested the wireless in the room, and it looked like everything is all set for a great Mix 08.

The Scavenger Hunt

I went to get a bite to eat, and bumped into Rob. After eating, we registered, and went to freshen up for the “Bring Silver to Light” event we signed up for. All we knew is that it was a scavenger hunt, and were looking forward to some fun.

We walked over to the Treasure Island Hotel, and found the Ballroom where the event was. We met the rest of the Blanchefleur team – Kerri Sweeney and Kirti Chandratreya from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, and Michael Iantosca who owns his own consulting group eDefine, and works with them onsite. We poured over the rules, and the items we had to find in the hunt. There were lots of places to go – The Venetian, The Mirage, The Palazzo, Treasure Island, and the Fashion Show Mall. We had 14 photos to take, and 3 bonus items to find. We had to incorporate a sign with the word Silver on it, a Silverlight sticker, and a beam of light from the included flashlight. The folks from Boston had some great ideas, we had some great ideas, and really gelled together nicely. We had a few open questions, like finding a Silverlight Luminary, where can we find Elvis, and whether we would make it all the way to the Fashion Show Mall, but those would play themselves out. We took the list, and headed out onto the Vegas Strip.

Some of the benefits of the gelled team came out quickly – we had a great idea to get a picture of Elvis – Madame Tussaud’s! The manager there let us in with a discounted rate, since we were on the scavenger hunt for the conference (gratuitous pitch to Visit Madame Tussaud’s at the Venetian Hotel).

The most interesting thing that happened to us was while we were walking around the Venetian, I spotted Scott Hanselman coming down the escalator. I immediately yelled out, “Hey! There’s Scott Hanselman! He can be our Silverlight Luminary” He turned around and walked over. We plowed through the awkward moment and told him the whole story of our scavenger hunt. We had to convince him that this was for real. He kept saying, “All I want to do is register for the conference.” He let us take his photo with the Silver sign, and we helped him find the registration booth. Thank you, Scott, for your graciousness.

We took the photos back to the Treasure Island Ballroom, struggled with the Silverlight app that wouldn’t play nice, and had a few beers. We laughed about our experiences, about the other teams that took themselves too seriously, and wondered if we would win the big prize. Either way, we made some friends, saw Las Vegas, got some fresh air, and had a great time.

The Update

The Prizes awarded for winning the Bring Silver to Light Scavenger Hunt included free Microsoft software and a 8GB Zune. Unfortunately, the Blanchefleur team did not win the grand prize. We also did not win the second place prize. And, we were not one of three teams to tie for third place either. We didn’t get anything. But we all had a lot of fun.

Ideation is a hot topic lately.

Wikipedia defines ideation as “the process of forming and relating ideas. It is a concept utilized in the study of New Product Development, creativity, innovation, design thinking and concept development.” The important part of the definition, however, is “As part of the move into Enterprise 2.0, usage of ideation in the product innovation process has become an integral element. In this context, employees or customers are invited to participate in the ideation process, via a web portal (open on the internet or intranet), where they can suggest new ideas, rate other ideas, and collaborate with the entire community in the process of ideation.”

Ideation can go too far, though. IBM has used the concept of ideation in an advertising campaign called “Stop Talking, Start Doing.” Two particular commercials stand out, one with ideators (is that a new word?) lying in a conference room, and one involving an ideation superhero.

The reason it is hot is because of a trend to enable those inside the company with a tool for collecting and implementing ideas. Dell’s IdeaStorm and Ubuntu’s Brainstorm are great examples of how a technology can enable ideation. So I decided to do a bit of Digging (just a little bit of foreshadowing there) on Google and found a number of Digg-like clones that are available. They are either open-source or hosted solutions.  Check them out:

• Upwarded
• UserVoice
• IdeaWicket
• Imaginatik Idea Central
• Pligg
• 3spots – List of Digg Clones
• Drigg
• Drupaligg

The most useful development tool I use makes me more productive on lots of tasks all day long.  I can open just about anything I am working on, and get the job done fast.  It applies colors sparingly to my work, and helps me identify mistakes.  It helps me multitask, working on many things at once.  It understands dozens of different languages with ease, all at the same time, and you can add more very easily.  It has all the qualities of a developer who embraces open source solutions – it is fast, cheap easy to use, and available for download any time on SourceForge.  I have tried its competitors, but this one stands out among the crowd.  It was recommended to me by a colleague, and switching over was very easy.  My most useful programming development tool ever is Notepad++.  I have used the standard Microsoft Notepad, and I have used TypePad, but Notepad++ is head and shoulders above the rest.  Give it a try.  You will convert too. 

Disagree?  What is your most useful programming development tool ever? Leave a comment and be heard.

I consider myself blessed to work for a company I believe in, and in a field that I love.  Working in the field of web development is exciting.  The job is never the same.  The technology is always in flux.  Tomorrow will be different than today.  Bristol-Myers Squibb has treated me well.  And they are doing it again.  I am now scheduled to attend the Mix ’08 Conference at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas from March 5 through March 7. 

Mix 07 was a fantastic conference, and Mix 08 looks to be just as great.  Steve Ballmer and Scott Guthrie will be keynote speakers this year.  The sessions look really interesting.  I am hoping to attend the MVC session from Scott Hanselman, some of the Web 2.0 panels, some SharePoint sessions, .Net 3.5 demos, WPF and Silverlight sessions, and some of the UI discussions. 

Last year I documented my trip with blog posts after each one of the sessions.  I hope to do the same this year.  I was criticized by some of my peers last year that my blog posts from each session didn’t really count as individual posts (we have a performance objective to post a specific number of blog entries per year) but as one giant post.  We will see if my online trip report creates as much of a stir again. 

I am really looking forward to Mix again this year.  Take a look at the sessions, and let me know if there are any that interest you.  I can try to attend, attend, and bring back as much information for you as I can.