Having recently returned from Mix 08 (yes, I stayed a few days beyond the conference), I thought I should follow up with my thoughts on this year’s event:
The Good
- Silverlight 2 Beta (We’ve come a long way since JavaScript!)
- The Balmer / Kawasaki Interview (Very entertaining on both sides)
- Deep Zoom (No, it’s not one of those pay-per-view shows that they are promoting for $14.95 in your hotel room… you know… the ones where they feel it is important to stress that movie titles do not appear on your hotel bill.)
- Meeting some community cohorts (like Karl and Jeremiah)
- Shaving off that ridiculous mustache (huh? a woman with a mustache?)
- Open Bar for the Mix party at Tau
- Me (after my 2nd Sapphire and Tonic at Tau)
The Mediocre
- The binding support in Silverlight 2 Beta (Alright, I originally had this under The Bad, but it was brought to my attention (thanks Nick) that the issues around data context inheritance have been fixed in the final Mix release. I updated my code and sure enough, it works! Nice!! Still… I shouldn’t need to write code to establish the source of a binding. Once there is support for ElementName and RelativeSource, I will move this up to The Good section. And if you give me support for data validation and support for binding to XML data via XPath expressions (along with an XmlDataSource, of course), then I’ll create The Excellent section just for Silverlight binding!)
The Bad
- The price of just about anything within the confines of The Venetian
- The air quality anywhere near a Vegas casino
- The faux vinyl, burlapesque manpurse given to each attendee
- The scenery at Tau Beach during the Mix party
- Me (after my 5th Sapphire and Tonic at Tau)
The Ugly
- The templating support in Silverlight 2 Beta (Have we just given up on the notion of a lookless control model?)
- The T-shirt in the aforementioned manpurse (Come on guys… this is a designer-heavy event! I recognize that last year’s T-shirt design set a pretty high bar, but did you just give up and not even try this year? Even setting the design aside, the souvenir quality alone is enough to automatically relegate it to the Good Will box. For those unable to attend, I’m sure you’ll be able to pick one up at your nearest second hand store under a sign that says "7$ each or 2 for $10".)
- Me (after my 7th Sapphire and Tonic at Tau)
Only just reading this now, but.. YES… re: the Mediocre. This reminds me I’m overdue on a post about what it was like as a WPF person getting my feet wet with Silverlight 2 Beta, and all the gotchas I came across. After finally getting comfortable with WPF databinding syntax and really getting to love it, I found Silverlight binding like pulling teeth. Hoping for more WPF-like binding support of the sorts you mention by release.