The event billed as ‘A 72-hour conversation between developers, designers and business professionals to explore high-fidelity commerce, content, media, services and security How new technologies can help find, retain and up-sell customers’ was held in Las Vegas on March 20-22nd, 2006. Being the first event of it’s kind didn’t know what to expect, and despite all the hype did walk away with some useful news on the latest on IE7, WPF and AJAX. Microsoft announced the release of the a “go-live” license for Atlas, and focussed on WPF/E.

WPF/E (WPF everywhere) for those not familiar, allows a subset of XAML to be rendered in a browser. While the complete functionality of WPF is not available, there is a set of solid functionality such as 2D vector graphics, animation, audio/video playback etc. available. WPF/E includes a partial .NET run-time and integrates well with Javascript. Saw a number of interesting demos.The keynote was held at one of Venetian Ballroom which is huge with seating on a first come, first served basis. The first few rows were cordonned off for the press. Bill Gates walked in to thunderous applause and flash lights popping. After the first few minutes of the hoopla, we were walked through a series of appearances by the likes of CTO of MySpace, folks from BBC etc. Session was capped off by Tim O’Rielly interviewing Bill Gates on stage.
Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace.com talked about MySpace and some highlighted the following,- used ASP.net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005- there were 64 million registered members- 9 million members converted to ASP.NET- 17 million – large scale dynamic caching – 26 million – 64 bit SQL Server 2005- Atlas “Profile” service in use to persist information. Some calls to “give us some open api please”.

Ashley Highfield the BBC Director of New Media and Technology was another presenter who talked about,- peer to peer streaming- digital rights managements, some free and some paid for- site visited by half of UK- navigatable content- extensive BBC archive
IE 7.0 features

increased emphasis on security, new antiphishing filter, with the address bar turning color (red, green) to indicate the safety of accessed site.
Infocard support – runs in seperate session then login session
tabbed browsing
Better CSS support
RSS – IE does not subscribe but user does
Transparent PNG

Thanks to the efforts of Joe Healy, Microsoft DE, who started the ball rolling, we will have our first ever .Net code camp here in Alabama, check out details at http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/. Looking foward to a great event.