Sean Gerety

Mix06

When I was at the PDC last year, one of the best things was the lounge area.  If you didn't want to sit and listen a speaker, you could go and hang out with the orange shirts (WPF Team), look at some code, demos and chat.  It was an actual conversation with the people that owned whatever technology you where interested in.  If Mix06 can achieve this feeling that will be a nice departure of running from room to room catching speakers.  And it actually will be a conversation.

So a little about Mix06.  It's in Vegas, in March ,in 2006, inside the Venetian Resort.

There's lot's of speakers, and not just people from Microsoft.  People from Frog Design and O'Reilly.  There's breakouts, discussions and hands on labs.  And there's Vegas.

There are two tracks. "Beyond the Browser" (weighing in at 21 sessions) and "Next Generation Browsing Experience" (weighing in at 30 sessions).  Beyond the Browser deals with things like WPF applications, UX, and non browser based apps (Media Center, Sidebar and Mobile).  Next Generation Browsing is exactly what you would expect.  Talks about IE7 and beyond, WPF/E, AJAX. 

However there are two sessions that I would think belong in the Beyond the Browser track. 
Developing a WPF Application by Filipe Fortes and a Designer's Overview of WPF by Robert Ingebretsen.  Maybe they are just sprinkled in there for curiosities sake, should a web developer stumble in I'm sure that they'll be surprised.  (In a good way, not the bad way of waking up in your hotel bathtub with ice around you and a missing kidney).

Another cool thing about this conference will be the first public unveiling of WPF/E.  WPF/E is Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere.  Seeing what WPF/E will run on will be tasty. I'm sure they'll demo Firefox, and possibly a Mac, maybe cell phones, and hell if they get a wild hair, a SPOT watch.

Did I mention that I'll see you there?  I'm going.  Booked and Registered.  But did I mention that there is a contest to get you there?  You can win airfare, admission and lodging at the Venetian and a moded Xbox 360.  And they've got flair, hey after all this is a UX conference

Tags: Mix06 | Expression | UX | XAML

WPF Coffee Talk (at a brewery)

I'd like to introduce a way for people to talk about and learn about improving User Experience (UX).  We'll be using Expression Interactive Designer (Sparkle), Visual Studio 2005(Cider) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, aka Avalon).  The idea is to have a small group of people discussing technology, tools, challenges and process over coffee.  I want to keep the group small so that we all can talk to each other instead of having someone talk 'at' you for an hour.  The reason for this is unless you're Don Box or Pamela Anderson people usually aren't going to pay attention to you for that long.  
 
We'll be discussing some high level introductory points initially and then as these go on well get more technical complete with ongoing projects.  I've got a project in which I show how I used the various tools.  And here's some of the questions that we'll discuss at the first Coffee Talk.
 
What's the payoff of UX?
How do I use these tools?
Which tool and when do I use it?
What's WPF?  Why should I care?  Why should my boss care?
How does UX fit in my development methodology?

Who should come?  Anyone that's interested, from a student to a CIO. 
Where is it going to be?  At the 5 Seasons Brewery. 
When?  7:00pm on 20 Feb 2006

See you there.

Sean