My take on MIX11

Last week, some of my colleagues and I went to the MIX11 at Las Vegas. Overall the conference was very helpful for me as a dev. I have to say, I constantly being amazed by the speed of our current technological advancement. There were some great demos in the keynote on what people have been doing with Kinect from the Kinect driven lounge chair car, to helping the visually impaired, to exploring the universe through gestures. I remember several years back, I watched a movie called Minority Report where Tom Cruise used Gestures to interact with everything in the computer. With Kinect exploring the universe demo, I really feel like the future is now. All what we need is some holographic projection and tie up with Kinect. LOL Doesn’t that sound simple… of course… not…

In the conference, Microsoft announced the new windows Phone 7 Mango, there are definitely some really cool new features coming out such as enhanced programmability of the Tile, being able to save tile at a page level, and better notifications and built in SQL DB. All are great features, but I kept on wondering why they come up with the name Mango…. It kept on reminding me of the SNL skit… every time when they mentioned it.

If you are fairly new to windows phone development, you should definitely watch the session: Expert Lessons: Top Tips for Building a Successful Windows Phone Application Even if you have developed some apps already, this session would be very helpful for you as well. But here are some highlights for your preview:

• Login page: Instead of a page, put it in a usercontrol
• Don’t add a home button in your app to create circular navigation.
• Always persist data from tombstone (OnNavigatedFrom to persist data and OnNavigatedTo to restore data)
• Always test every page for tombstoning.
• Understand the various states and always test on real device in real situations such as when you receive a call, in and out of internet connectivity
• Always test your app with the changes of Language settings and also theme changes.
• Make sure that your app supports Orientation change. Just simply change the SupportedOrientations = “Portrait” to SupportedOrientations=”PortraitOrLandscape” on the top of each of the page
• Always add a send Feedback button so you can better improve your app, since there are always something that you might not have considered.

So there are 7 things to check before you hit submit for the market place.

• No network, no problem
• <90MB
• Theme aware
• Handle Exceptions
• Back button works as expected
• User consent dialogs & settings
• Pauses/resumes user’s music

Analyzing and Improving Windows Phone Application Performance is also a very helpful session as well which helps you through how to improve the performance of your phone app not just using the profiler, but how to code better and what to consider because of the windows phone resource limitations and such.

I also found the session: Enhanced Push Notifications and Tiles for Windows Phone to be very helpful as well which talks about how to take the advantage of the push notifications and tile updates to better improve the usability of the app.

Of course, there are many other sessions that were very helpful, you should definitely check them out