Robs Usability Development : Silverlight, ASP.NET, Ajax, Agile, MVC & Volta

So finally it has begin, the Mix conference for 2008. I already added some pictures of the pre conference together@mix and will add some more later. Check out the pictures page.

I had planned on talking about the keynote, about Silverlight 2.0, of which you can download the beta now!. And ofcourse about Internet Explorer 8, with a bunch of very nice new fetures I had not expected.

But as always someone else has already done the hard work. Tim sneath has almost written a live transcript of the keynote, so I’m definetly not gonna repeat his hard work.

And last but not least: they have Surface tables here. I´ll probably have to make some extra room in my suitcase

• MIX08 Keynote Live Blog
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1
• Expression Studio 2 Beta
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 SDK
• Blend 2.5 March Preview

Keep you posted.

Robertjan Tuit

One of the most asked questions about Volta is how it will compare to other technology from Microsoft Silverlight.

Is it going to replace Silverlight, or is Volta just a step to when Silverlight matures.

In the Volta Microsoft Press Pass Q&A with Erik Meijer, former professor at the Univerisity of Utrecht now program manager of Volta, says :

Volta is an MSIL to MSIL toolkit aimed at making writing distributed applications easier. Silverlight is an implementation of the .NET platform that therefore will automatically benefit from the advantages of the Volta toolkit.

And in the last blog post from the volta team we read:

All the benefits of the Volta toolkit, such as declarative tier-splitting and asynchronous programming or declarative import of JavaScript libraries into .NET, will apply to programs deployed to the Silverlight platform. In fact, we are in the process of replacing the browser helper objects used to facilitate debugging in this preview, which host the regular desktop CLR in IE and Firefox, and are replacing them instead with the Silverlight 2.0 runtime.

Does this mean that Volta will eventually operate it’s tier-splitting funcionality trought silverlight? This would maken not Volta OR silverlight, but Volta AND Silverlight the technologies to watch the coming years. I cant wait!

Robertjan Tuit

p.s. If you’r wondering what the car has to do with the story, only it’s name: the very beautifull Toyota Volta.