Yesterday, the European tour of MIX Essentials, the watered-down version of the Microsoft tech event, hit Belgium. Since the focus there was on Silverlight, I thought it would be cool if I dropped by. Silverlight is what MS hopes will become their Flash killer, and since at work we’re being tugged ever nearer to a close collaboration with the Redmond crowd, and to using Silverlight, I reckoned any info I could glean from what was still a very abstract concept, to me at least, would come in handy.
I kept a bit of a diary during the day.
6:57 Wake up to an annoying rabbit song that is doing the rounds. Get ready and leave for the train station.
7:46 Queueing for a ticket makes me miss my 7:50 train. I take the next one, call my gf and fire up the laptop, checking some feeds through Google Gears – that’s right no free wifi on Belgian trains.
10:15 Arrive in Louvain-la-Neuve (Neuve means new and the place sure looks its name – as if it was bombed and rebuilt Disney-style just a couple years back). Tourist office directs me to the venue and I sneak into the opening keynote: how XAML makes it easy for designers and developers to get along while sharing images for webapps. Neat.
12:15 End of keynote. Got some good insights in how Silverlight works with other apps, but I do get the impression these MS demos are all the same. We got the same info at work when our local public authorities liaison visited.
12:30 Lunch seems to be postponed – till 1:30 so I check out a quick demo of using rich content apps (built in SL) for viral marketing purposes. Not very interesting.
1:30 Phone is dying, laptop battery is dying and my girlfriend calls with some sad news. Trying to comfort her and thinking of leaving, but it’s okay so I’m having a sandwich. Run into a couple Belgian bloggers.
2:00 Funny session by two Brits playing the Laurel and Hardy of developers and designers (dev-igners they call them here). Pretty interesting and definitely inspiring. Now all we need at work is unlimited time, funding and staff resources.
3:00 Take some photographs of this most remarkable of buildings we’re in. I discover that the auditorium is actually free floating above the main hall. Scary.
3:30 Hide in the dark in the back of the auditorium top floor, recharching my battery and surfing the web. Listen to a demo of Silverlight app building. Lots of Xamling and inside jokes about Comic Sans, Flickr and Twitter downtime, and developer/designer differences. It’s good to be a geek.
4:00 Quick fag and then sit in the back for the Ballmer keynote. Lots of security. Ballmer talks of the future of the web, developers (of course) and opportunities for publishers, enterprises and advertisers. I admit: MS does have its vision. You may not agree, it may not be the one and only end-all solution, but in the past year of working and meeting a number of MS peeps, I’ve noticed they too do share a strong motivation to make things happen.
5:00 Keynotes ends with Q&A and I move to the front. I manage to get to ask the final question, on how he envisages MS’s role in keeping the web relevant not only to developers, advertizers or enterprises, but to regular users as well. Does he think semantic web is just a buzz or is MS going to engage in that area of search and indexing as well?
Well, that was the idea. I’m not sure it came across like that, and I’m not sure why I didn’t get the answer. Was it because I was flushed and not paying attention, or because steveb@microsoft.com just didn’t get it? A guy from a Belgian semantic search startup who came up to me afterwards, suggested it was the latter.
5:15 Have a quick drink and talk to one or two people, but I’ve seen enough MS geeks for the day and I want to see my girl (boohoo, so sweet) so I leave.
I took a tonne of pictures. After the event, which was pretty cool and a lot of fun, I texted my employer to thank him for what is after all a cool job he lets me do. He said thank you instead.
