It’s difficult to miss what’s happening with MIX, there’s so much discussion about the announcements and technologies released.
Danny Ayers was able to discuss what he was shown on his recent trip to Microsoft: Astoria, a RESTful interface to data services through the web. The data can be returned as XML, JSON, or a subset of RDF/XML, which is a little surprising. I’ve not had much chance to look around–I hit ADO.NET and bounced back. I’ll have more on this later.
The second one was all things Silverlight. You would think that Microsoft invented, well, Flash. Mary Jo Foley covered the new Silverlight Streaming and quotes Ray Ozzie saying it …will let you post your media to the Microsoft storage service in the cloud. Posting to Microsoft’s centralized server is not ‘posting to the cloud’, from a distributed point of view.
I was more interested in the new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and the cross-platform CLR, but I’m still trying to find the real bits from the marketing. Sure a lot of marketing folks at MIX. Why in all that is holy, was Michael Arrington interviewing Ray Ozzie? You need to sell to the developers Microsoft–you don’t need VC money. Sucking up to the wrong crowd. Oh, there we go.
Between MS and Adobe, Rich Internet Application developers (that’s ‘Ajax’ for you not in the know, do try to keep up with the changing terminology, or be marked as passè) will be inundated with a barrage of new tools in the next year. Competition is good for the developers…as long as you can survive the corporate love.