If it weren't for Fritz Onion, the second and final day of ReMix07 Boston would have been a total wash. What a disappointment. I started the day with Fritz's "Building Silverlight enabled ASP.NET AJAX Controls" which was outstanding, but then made the mistake of going to a session on Expression followed by a session on WPF that were given by bona fide Microsoft employees. Guys like myself who merely give semiannual weekend code camp talks and live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones, but these sessions were absolutely horrible, the worst I've seen in a long time. The only good thing I could say about the Expressions presentation is that it ended a half-hour early (which in itself is pretty bizarre, don't you think?) Someone said in the hall after the Expressions session that maybe the guy was hung over. Who knows.
The WPF presentation was practically all Powerpoints of bulleted 18px black text on plain white backgrounds. You'd think if Microsoft wanted to introduce exciting new technologies they'd make an effort to get capable presenters within their, um, rather massive organization to introduce them. After 20 minutes or so of the WPF presentation people started dropping like flies, getting up and leaving the room one after another. I was in the back row and looked across the row to observe that almost everyone was leaning over with their heads down, enduring the death-march drone from the front of the room. I stuck for 30 minutes until I joined the exodus. I was thinking of that line from the movie Bug's Life in the circus tent when the fly says, "I have only twenty-four hours to live, and I ain't gonna waste it here."
Up until the dual Microsoft Bizarro Presenter Encounter, ReMix07 was a great experience and I learned a lot. What did I learn? 1) Designers -> Expression -> XAML <-> Developers: Brilliant. Brad Abram's keynote and the Magenic session showed me that. 2) While I used ASP.NET AJAX to build a custom slideshow control for Community Server not long ago, the understanding I gained from Fritz Onion's sessions makes me want to find other ways to use the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit, both at DBVT.COM and on my clients' sites. 3) Silverlight 1.1 is going to be fantastic! Thanks to Jeff Prosise for the confirmation. 4) Rocky Lhotka demonstrated that WPF has great potential in his Magenic app demo. 5) In a few months I'll be spending a lot of time in Expression Studio and the complexion of my workday is going to change substantially. 6) Anthony Handley of Magenic made me realize that I need to pull my Photoshop Channel Chops book off the shelf to prepare for ripping Alpha Channels and masked layers from Photoshop as PNGs into Expression.
It's clear from the ReMix07 Boston attendance numbers that there's a huge amount of interest in Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, Expression and WPF, and that Microsoft has a winning technology and strategy. As a result of ReMix07 Boston (with inspiration from Chris Bowen and Bob Familiar's New England MSDN Road Shows which initially piqued my interest--please come back to Vermont from Boston for the springtime!) I'm excited to be a part of that future.