Caught some of the sessions in the Microsoft tech-days Developer 2009 event. The sessions were from developers all over the world some 90 odd sessions spanning a 24 hour period. The sessions I caught were mainly related to Windows Development and Frameworks and the Developer Tools and the Web Development and User Experience sessions. Rachel Appel’s session on WebForms vs MVC was interesting.

The new Virtual Earth Silverlight Map Control and the VESMP CTP Interactive SDK were made available at the Mix (beta). The map control is a Silverlight 3.0 plug-in (available as a beta) that streams data directly to a map. Currently available interactive maps on Google or Microsoft Live.com all use AJAX that only allows zoom levels to a certain level (about 19), but this control allows deeper levels (deep zoom). The transitions between zoom levels are very smooth. It also allows the display of more then 500 pins (actually brushes). The SDK CTP is available at http://tinyurl.com/c2eqfy.

The control can be coded with Xaml or C# and one can override mouse/keyboard events. Any maps or projections can be used, not just what Microsoft provides. There are no current capabilities in the control to take in spatial data from SQL Server database (SQL Server 2008 already supports some geometry types currently) – not known if this will be in the final release. Route geometry can be stuck as a BLOB in the database and VE team is working with SQL Server team to have types introduced for storing the geo data directly in SQL Server.

Neither, birds eye view or 3D transformations works currently in the control (there was a comment by the speaker that the team is working on something big that cannot be disclosed currently). Same is true of multi-touch and Surface team. CAML support may or may not be in CTP.

The currently existing AJAX map control will not go away.

Virtual Earth web services (launched last year) allows communication with VE platform through WCF. Services included for imagery (metadata of the map-aerial images overlay), routing from map, geo-coding (locating locations) and search (yellow page listings) capabilities. There’s an SLA for web services.

Silverlight 3.0 is slated for release towards the end of this year; however a beta is available for download now that has all the flashy streaming media controls shown in the many demos. NetFlix showed off the adaptive streaming/buffering capabilities of the media control. There are over 100 Silverlight 3.0 controls and a slew of improvements including – hardware acceleration, 3D support, Deep Zoom, Multi-touch, Library caching, Style Inheritance, data binding to name a few. There was also a great deal of emphasis of SEO (search engine optimization) throughout the conference.

The Expression suites of products (Web, Blend etc) are primarily UI designer tools. Expression Blend 3 has a nice new component called SketchFlow that allows you take a static (such as a Photoshop) image and build an animated UI prototype from it (without any code) that can be shipped to customers who can then mark their comments and send it back to the developer. The entire design can then be exported to a word document. Pretty cool tool, available as a free download.

Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview feature allows developers to quickly compare how a page is rendered in different browsers at the same time. Great thing is it allows one to test all on a single box – IE 6, 7 and 8 markup differences (without VMs). Also available as a free, download (beta).

Silverlight 3.0 applications can now run outside the browser. The out of browser applications run sandboxed, and has built in auto-update support i.e. once deployed are automatically updated from the web server.