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• MIX08 Day 2 Keynote Live Blog

  I'm going to be "live blogging" the Steve Ballmer keynote this afternoon at this URL. Keep this blog post bookmarked and start hitting "refresh" shortly after the keynote starts at 1pm Pacific / 9pm GMT. Or simply tune in to the webcast ( 750kbps , 300kbps , 100kbps ) and watch it live yourself! 1:04pm - Ray Winninger (my boss!) is on stage to announce MIX09, taking place here at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas between March 18th-20th, 2009. No - registration hasn't opened yet! 1:07pm - Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer are now sitting in comfy chairs, ready for Q&A. 1:08pm - Guy: why do you want to buy Yahoo? Steve: we've shown tenacity around advertising. Search is the killer feature for online advertising. You could say that we're not where we'd like to be, but we're very committed. Yahoo seems to be a way to accelerate that because of the required critical mass. "What's the current state of the offer?" Steve: We've made an offer - that's all I can say! 1:13pm - Guy: so you're telling me you're an underdog? Steve: Yes, you could say that, for this space. 1:14pm - Guy: I know this won't leave the room, but I use a Motorola Q phone running Windows Mobile, not an iPhone, because I need Exchange. 1:16pm - Guy: tell us about the deal with Facebook. Steve: again, it's about advertising. 1:17pm - Guy: what drives you? Steve: Three things: firstly, I love what I do - bringing out great products like Silverlight 2 and IE 8. Secondly, I get to work with some of the smartest people in the world. Lastly, I enjoy a challenge. 1:19pm - Guy: can you describe a typical day in the life of SteveB? Steve: there are three kinds of days. Sometimes I'm outside of Redmond meeting with customers, flying around the world. Sometimes I'm in the office with back-to-back strategy meetings. Sometimes I have a day where I can think, write and research where there's only perhaps one meeting and I can really focus on strategy. Guy: how much email do you have? Steve: I get perhaps sixty emails a day. Guy: really? I don't believe it. Steve: why do people get a lot of mail? Human beings aren't abusive in general, they send thoughtful, constructive mails. I might get more than sixty tomorrow, of course! 1:23pm - Guy: can you talk about Bill's departure? Steve: he's very fortunate. He's had something to build professionally in Microsoft, and now he's got a second opportunity... Posted Mar 06 2008, 11:37 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, web, windows, vista, mix08, silverlight 2.0, Windows Live, ie, office

• A Great Early Silverlight 2 Showcase: TextGlow

  We're already starting to see some cool samples that use Silverlight 2 really effectively. Prior to MIX, we had a small private beta running to get some early feedback on the builds that we were producing, and a few folk made really good use of this time to build some interesting ideas out. This one is one of my favorites: TextGlow is a Silverlight 2 application that reads Word .docx files. The Open XML format is an ECMA-ratified standard, and having a web-based runtime with the power Silverlight makes it possible to accomplish something that I don't think you could do easily with any other technology. TextGlow downloads Word documents asynchronously, opens them as ZIP files, parses them with LINQ-to-XML and then renders them using the WPF-based text and graphics APIs. This is a big deal, and not just because it's a cool Silverlight sample. In years gone by, if you wanted to share a document on the web, you'd typically have converted it to PDF format (assuming you had the full version of Adobe Acrobat on your system). Having two versions of the document meant changes were hard: you had to reconvert the document every time you made a change or the PDF file wouldn't match the current version. TextGlow solves that problem by providing cross-platform access to the source Word document, regardless of whether you have Office installed on your machine or not. The version of TextGlow above is a demonstrator, but there's endless potential for this. I hope the SharePoint team is watching, in particular. TextGlow was written by Intergen , a New Zealand-based partner. You can read more about the way the application was built from one of the developers, James Newton-King . One caveat: the demonstrator currently has rendering issues on Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 (it's an HTML/CSS thing!). Although it works perfectly well, the control is sized too small. For best results, try it out with Internet Explorer 7, Firefox or Safari. Hopefully they'll have that fixed by the end of today. Posted Mar 06 2008, 09:40 AM by Tim Sneath Filed under: Silverlight, sample, mix08, silverlight 2.0, office, ooxml