www.nickhodge.com

The Crown Prom­en­ade is a good hotel. Above is a view of my hotel room late last week. You are a walk away from los­ing your cash play­ing poker in the casino; a little fur­ther away from South­bank eat­er­ies.  Oh, and Mel­bourne does the best cof­fee out­side Venice, in my book.

Now ima­gine never see­ing out­side, and join­ing the glit­ter­ati of the Aus­tralian Web Design com­munity at Australia’s first ReMIX. User Exper­i­ence, Expres­sion, Sil­ver­light and key­notes from US personages.

To keep up with the fun and frolic, you can also join the Twit­ter: http://twitter.com/auremix07

Come join us!

Microsoft’s John Lam and Jim Hugunin go large with the DLR at MIX07. Here are my notes whilst listen­ing and watch­ing the presentation:

What to expect: a Mac, Text­Mate, Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, Safari and Silverlight.  Text­Mate equals text edit­ing. Sil­ver­light is not bin­ary, its just XML and text. You can break it apart and look at the gooey­ness inside. And some friendly Microsoft people ban­ter­ing about Ruby vs Python.

And DLR is going Open Source, like Iron­Py­thon.

What strikes me the most is that the lan­guage that people are com­fort­able with: Javas­cript, Python, Ruby, C# — you can code your cli­ent side in the same lan­guage as server side.

Also, hav­ing Ruby instan­ti­ate Javas­cript and call func­tions. Wow. With a C# object doing UI. Tech­nor­ati via XML through Yahoo!Pipes to JSON to Sil­ver­light on a Mac. Retriev­ing from the JSON object deseri­al­ised and quer­ied via LINQ.

Let alone doing Basic, with REM and all.

In their only Power­point slide, Jim details the per­form­ance gains of Iron­Py­thon on the CLR engine. I won­der if the perf gains are going to match to Ruby, too? Is the DLR/CLR going to be the saviour of the scal­ing bumps of Ruby?

Parts of the DLR (from Jim Hugunin at end of video):

1. Dynamic type sys­tem, shared object system
2. Shared host­ing API; host one, get all of ‘em. ruby bits are com­ing together now.
3. Bunch of help­ers for com­piler writers, so dynamic lan­guage runs fast

Ques­tion: can use DLR inside con­sole, ASP.NET?

Answer: yes, you can use DLR any­where you are using .NET. More con­strained in Sil­ver­light, due to the sandbox.

Ques­tion: is it com­pil­ing an assembly, or execut­ing script

Answer: Dynamic meth­ods in .NET 2.0, for code gen­er­a­tion lazily; and is a dynamic method. Only held whilst there is a live ref­er­ence. ASP.NET scen­arios with stress test not held onto. Not using method rental; System.Reflection.EmitDynamicMethod

Ques­tion: JScript.NET vs. new Dynamic Lan­guage Jscript?

Answer: Developer want lan­guage pur­ity, not tight integ­ra­tion and fol­low­ing .NET. So fol­low the ECMA 3.0 spec. That’s Javas­cript. vs. Ruby “freelove” spe­cific­a­tion of Ruby is its imple­ment­a­tion, not a spe­cific­a­tion document.

Microsoft has changed, big time. My head is spinning.

Keep­ing secrets is tough. Hear­ing about the Dynamic Lan­guage Runtime (DLR) from John Lam in Feb­ru­ary this year was one of those secrets that kept well.

John Udell inter­viewed John Lam, and has a back­grounder here. Some in the Ruby com­munity didn’t see this com­ing.

Jim Hugunin has a post­ing on the new DLR, open source nature of the DLR on his “Think­ing Dynam­ic­ally” blog.

In addi­tion to the Sil­ver­light release, we’ve also made the full source code for both Iron­Py­thon and all of the new DLR plat­form code avail­able on code­plex under the BSD-style Microsoft Per­missive License. All of that code can be down­loaded today as part of the Iron­Py­thon pro­ject at codeplex.com/ironpython.

The real­ity of being able to debug Ruby in a client-side UI frame­work on Safari on a Mac using Microsoft Sil­ver­light tickles me, and oth­ers, greatly.

Blog from the key­note today, with all the ups-and-downs. Good to see I am not the only one who craves demos and has sub­vers­ive thoughts in the midst of formal sessions.

Ryan Stew­art has com­ments, and fur­ther links. The DLR adds 400K (what the!) to the Sil­ver­light down­load. Wow.

zdnet has a sort of tran­script of the Q&A that occured with Mike Arring­ton, Ray Ozzie and Scottgu.

Does Microsoft get Web 2.0? Yes.

Dumb Video is hard. You spend all your time edit­ing, fix­ing audio, encod­ing and uploading.

Smart Video is going to be easy with this Microsoft Sil­ver­light stuff. URLs, chapters, and deeper sub-tagging. All these ideas are flow­ing through my mind from this con­ver­sa­tion from Uncle Dave, the Life Kludger.

Ima­gine a can­vas of videos and pod­casts. Zoom into one, and see the “sub-tags” or links to other videos, or gen­eral searches. Sort of a doing what HTML does for text for other, non-textual content.

Time to learn some new stuff.

Are you are los­ing sleep because:

1. Elvis left the build­ing some 30 years ago in August 1977?
2. Myf War­hust thinks Elvis serves fish and chips some­where in Bendigo, Victoria?
3. Las Vegas MIX07 has been com­pletely booked out?

Don’t lose another minute of sleep!

The MIX exper­i­ence is being trans­por­ted and ReMIX’d at the Crown Prom­en­ade on 25-26^th June 2007.

Remix Aus­tralia will be the first of its kind from Microsoft bring­ing together Web Developers & Design­ers with our key spon­sors. It’s a jam packed two day exper­i­ence – a 48 hour conversation.

The event is only $140 per per­son, and all del­eg­ates will get, exper­i­ence and gen­er­ally, or whatever:

• A Microsoft Expres­sion Web
• New net­work­ing friend­ships without Twitter.com
• A choice of 20 ses­sions to check out from expert lead­ers & case studies
• Hear from Aus­tralian Industry & over­seas experts
• Time out at the Sand­box, espe­cially if you are not play­ing nice with the other kids
• A sight­ing of Elvis
• Action packed even­ing at Galactic Cir­cus on Monday even­ing. (you’ll find me on the Defender game)
• Par­ti­cip­ate in Meet­ing Point – pick the con­ver­sa­tions you want to hear and be part of, or just read the blogs and drool over the Flickrs and wish you were there in person
• Meet with Microsoft Part­ners to under­stand how they can facil­it­ate Web 2.0
• Dis­cover: Inter­net Alley; the enter­tain­ment lounge web jams.
• Go large and become world-famous with “The Geek Stor­ies”

I’ll be there, maybe with a ses­sion or two of my own. I’m think­ing about doing a demo of how I use Pho­toshop, Premiere and Vista with some other cool goodies.

More info as it comes to hand.

Michael Arring­ton Will Mix it Up at MIX!
Michael Arring­ton, founder and editor of Tech­Crunch, will be join­ing Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie and many more web luminar­ies at this year’s MIX. Via Tech­Crunch, a web­log “dedicated to obsess­ively pro­fil­ing and review­ing new Inter­net products and com­pan­ies”, Michael is known for being one of those most likely to identify the next big thing. Fans of Michael and Tech­Crunch should not miss this oppor­tun­ity to see him join the con­ver­sa­tion and share his insights.  

I wish I could go. All the cool people are going.

Can I Frank?