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Age of wise foolishness?

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:43

Jon Honeyball discusses the good, the bad and the outright ugly from the recent mix09 conference.

Next up was the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer Kit (WPIK). Configuring web servers, with their myriad extensions, add-ins, database engines and other bits and bobs, has turned into a real nightmare. Is anyone ever 100% sure that they've got the configuration right every time? Now WPIK offers a good start on sorting out this mess, by allowing you to take pre-cooked configurations and slap them onto your server, safe in the knowledge that those configuration settings are correct. Then there's Applications Gallery, which lets you browse a range of tools and have them installed into your server.

Now we arrive at the biggie, the launch of the beta of Silverlight 3. Without doubt this has been a huge success for Microsoft. Silverlight 1 was launched in September 2007, and the 18 months since then has seen the launch of Silverlight 2 and more than 350 million downloads of the new display technology. Microsoft is providing Silverlight on both the Windows and Mac platforms, leaving others to push forward with open-source versions. As if 350 million downloads weren't impressive enough, the claim of 300,000 developers and designers isn't to be sniffed at either. So what's new in version 3? Well, the big news is support for GPU-accelerated hardware and a bunch more codecs, such as H.264, AAC and MPEG4. There's also a set of IIS server-side extensions designed to deliver streaming video to each individual client. This combination of Silverlight 3 and IIS video extensions is a game-changing advance: Microsoft demonstrated how you can have HD-quality video streamed on a per-person basis and use this facility to provide an IPTV solution that really works. Not only that, but the user can pause and rewind the video, and do all the things they could do with a local PVR solution, but for video streamed from web-based servers. I'm now convinced that Microsoft has the long-term goal of signing up the big TV and media organisations to deliver video content on a per-person basis over the internet.

Corporations such as the BBC or NBC might want their own datacenters, but that's a very capital-intensive project and one that's best left to those who understand the network architecture and can deliver the software infrastructure. In Microsoft's Cloud computing platform and front-end tools such as Silverlight 3, we may be staring at the future face of TV broadcasting. It's been a long, hard road for Microsoft, which has been pouring money into IPTV for the best part of two decades now, but maybe it's finally on the verge of cracking it with Silverlight 3. Oh, and in case you weren't aware, Silverlight 2 was used extensively during the coverage of the Beijing Olympics, with 1.3 billion page views. Using Silverlight 3, the 2010 Winter Olympics IPTV coverage promises to be even stronger, because it will be offering full 720p HDTV quality with the same DVR/PVR capabilities of pause and rewind, plus super slow motion and high-resolution frame grabs. One hugely significant new feature of Silverlight 3 is that it works out of a browser. You can create completely standalone applications that work just fine, which is a significant leap over the Adobe competition, and one that's interesting because standalone applications have lots of advantages over web-based lash-ups. Did I mention the offline streaming support too?

The next thing they showed us were improvements to the Expression Blend 3 graphical development tool. The idea is that your designer sketches out a design that's required, and this sketch can be made part of the whole source control workflow - you can add functionality to these sketched diagrams and make them interactive, thus making it far faster to develop interesting and interactive, project-related user interfaces.