MIX 11 In review
Last month I attended MIX 11 in Las Vegas. MIX is a Microsoft event that is promoted as a casual conversation of developers, designers and business professionals. This event is 100% web application related and covers everything from development to design and rich media. The great news is if you didn’t attend, almost the entire event is available recorded on Channel 9. This was my 3rd time attending the event and I enjoy it because it’s a great opportunity to sit down and chat with influential developers and designers. This year was especially exciting because I knew that WebMatrix would be a bit part of the event and here at Applied Innovations, we’re closely involved in that project.
AppliedI in the MIX11 Keynote Addresses
As I mentioned WebMatrix is really an exciting product for us. It’s the first product that allows you to easily create a development environment that mimics your production environment so closely and at the same time allows you to automatically publish files, publish databases, set permissions and support: ASP.NET, PHP, MySQL and MS SQL!
During the keynote address Scott Hanselman built the backend of a demo application in Visual Studio 2010 that used HTML5, jQuery, MVC and NuGet. Then around the 52 minute mark Scott used WebMatrix to build the front end for this application. Scott demonstrated how you could purchase a template from templatemonster and quickly build a custom website with a professional design. Then at the one hour mark he used WebMatrix and Web Deploy to publish his application to AppliedI.net:
After Scott, Drew Robbins gave a demo of the Orchard CMS where he built a Flower store. Orchard CMS is an opensource CMS solution that’s brand new and quickly become very popular (in fact, it was all the buzz at MIX). During Drew’s demo he built a store using widgets and helpers to show just how much easier web development has become today. At the end of Drew’s demo (about the 1 hour 15 minute mark), he published his site to his shared hosting provider .. Applied Innovations:
and you can see that demo yourself still running at: http://wmdemo.webmatrix-appliedi.net/
Awesome Elastic Cloud Hosting is born!
The second reason I was excited to attend MIX’11 and the real reason I was there is that we were announcing the open beta of a new project we’ve been working on for the past year, Awesome Elastic Cloud Hosting which is available today at www.awesome.net.
What is Elastic Cloud Hosting?
Simply, it’s the future of web hosting and the culmination of everything cloud up to this point. Elastic Cloud Hosting is the ability to host your website on multiple web servers that are all load balanced and clustered. In the event a web server fails, the other servers in the cluster immediately take over the processing of your website and your visitors never see an outage! In the event your website gets spotlighted on Good Morning America, Oprah, Slashdot or any of a number of web server crushing services your website will automatically scale out across more web servers and magically handle the load for you with your visitors never seeing an outage or a slow down!
This is truly awesome web hosting technology and as such we’ve decided to launch it on http://www.awesome.net/ and encourage you to try it. The Awesome.net platform was announced in two sessions (one on Orchard and one on MVC) and around 1200 attendees invited to the beta.
Miscellaneous MIX’11
MIX this year also talked a great deal about Windows Phone 7 and the enhancements being made to this platform. This was especially exciting because Windows Phone 7 leverages Silverlight for application development and pretty much anyone that develops web applications can easily develop mobile applications with Windows Phone 7. Microsoft also talked about the XBOX Kinect and that Microsoft will be releasing Kinect for the PC!
Of course, I can’t write a blog post about MIX’11 without talking about our good friend Clint Rutkas or as he’ll be known from now on .. Dr. Xavier!
Clint Rutkas (Microsoft Evangelist) single handedly built two robotic reclining chairs that you could drive by simply waving your hands in front of a Kinect sensor! It was on the front page of all of the tech websites after MIX. Clint and Microsoft will be releasing the source code and plans for this contraption shortly but here’s yours truly enjoying a ride in the chair:
Here’s a few other photos
That’s myself with a couple of the folks from the Microsoft Web Platform
That’s Josh Holmes (Microsoft Evangelist & proudly hosted with AppliedI) and myself
That’s John McCarrick from Parallels (our automation partners) & myself
That’s myself and Thomas Robbins from Kentico.com one of our app partners
That’s Philip Beadle (hosted here at AppliedI) from DotNetNuke and guess who.. yeap.. me.
