Mix'11 Sessions Proposed, please vote now

Las Vegas will host Mix again this year, between April 12 and 14. As always I expect there will be a wide range of interests around Microsoft technologies represented at the event.
I proposed a total of nine talks for the event, sadly only three were accepted for the community voting. If you would like to attend any of these presentations please will you click on the link in the title and vote for them.

Wave, Touch, Pen, Speech, Mouse and Keyboard
In the last decade we have seen a variety of new interfaces popularized. With Microsoft Kinect you are the controller. There are screens that can see like Microsoft Surface. We have touch screens that can feel you and pen interfaces that provide rich digital inking capabilities. Speech technology to control an computer has existed for over a decade now. Yet we still are using the mouse and keyboard almost daily.In this session you will explore how the different input technologies can be applied to different categories of engagement. You will learn why the mouse and keyboard is here to stay and when you should take advantage of the other input technologies. This session will also provide you with some insight into how you can apply combinations of input to enhance your applications further.

How to build a great Microsoft Surface application
Microsoft Surface represents a new category in computing. Vision based screens enable unique interactions and they present fantastic opportunities for innovative software to be created. In this session you will learn what makes Microsoft Surface unique and how you can use that to build great software for Microsoft Surface. This session will cover the user interfaces and concepts that you need to apply in order to take advantage of the technology in MicrosoftSurface. With the imminent release of Microsoft Surface 2.0 this session will cover everything you need to build really amazing experiences for MicrosoftSurface.The company Dr.Neil works for has more applications certified for Microsoft surface than any other company in the world. This session will provide some insight into how they conjure up the magic that enables them to repeatedly build awesome Surface experiences.

Building Really Social Software
Technology can be both an inhibitor and an enabler of social engagement. This session presents a discussion on how technology can be used to enrich the dialogue between users. When you consider many forms of computing today you think of users staring into a screen and yet the most successful systems, such as twitter and Facebook, are really about how people converse with each other. In the last few years new categories of technology, such as Microsoft Surface and Kinect, have emerged that truly bring people together. This session will discuss the way these new technologies (and others) will change the way we can use technology to enhance human interactions.

Then with the other Surface MVPs we are proposing a discussion on all things relating to Natural User Interfaces.

The Microsoft Surface MVPs present: Natural User Interfaces, Today and Tomorrow; an interactive discussion and demonstration
Joshua Blake; Neil Roodyn; Dennis Vroegop; Rick Barraza; Bart Roozendaal; Josh Santangelo; Nicolas Calvi
The Natural User Interface (NUI) is a hot topic that generates a lot of excitement, but there are only a handful of companies doing real innovation with NUIs and most of the practical experience in the NUI style of design and development is limited to a small number of experts. The Microsoft Surface MVPs are a subset of these experts that have extensive real-world experience with Microsoft Surface and other NUI devices.This session is a panel featuring the Microsoft Surface MVPs and an unfiltered discussion with each other and the audience about the state of the art in NUI design and development. We will share our experiences and ideas, discuss what we think NUI will look like in the near future, and back up our statements with cutting-edge demonstrations prepared by the panelists involving combinations of Microsoft Surface 2.0, Kinect, and Windows Phone 7.

Please submit your vote for the sessions you would like to attend or hear. Remember many of the sessions get recorded and published online after the event.

The presentations that got rejected were:

Confuse me, lose me
Lets face it no one reads the manual anymore. Software should be so easy to use that the user can just walk up and start using it. So why is this not the case?
In this session Dr. Neil will discuss how interfaces can be built to enable users to get started with new technology and learn by using the system. A rich discussion of the pitfalls of complexity and how to simplify your user interface will allow you to leave this session with a set of tips to make your applications easier to use.
This session will provide an insight in to the thinking behind Natural User Interfaces as well as how to improve your Graphical User Interfaces.

Future Furniture
What will the furniture of the future look like? What functionality will it provide? This session provides you with a fun filled look into the way technology is being built into furniture and how furniture may look in our meeting rooms, our office and our homes in 10 years time.
Microsoft Surface has provided a glimpse into this future of furniture, where a table is no longer just an inert object but provides rich digital content. How else might our future change with new innovations that we expect to see emerge in the coming decade.

Look into my eyes
Face to face meetings provide the best way to really understand another person. Human interaction happens between people. Business transactions are agreements between people. It is easy to forget that everything we do in the software industry is still about people. In this session you will discover how technologies like Surface 2.0 can enrich the true social interactions between people. You will also learn why it is important for software developers to understand the nature of human engagement in order to build better

Now you’re speaking my language
Do you want to support multiple languages in your software? Can’t afford to pay for a translator to translate your software into every language? Microsoft Translator will help you support multiple languages in your application.
At Mix 09 Microsoft announced the release of the Microsoft Translator SDK. At Mix 10 Microsoft announced an update to the Microsoft Translator SDK include the Community Translation Framework. Come to this session to find out the new technology being released by the Microsoft Translator team.
Microsoft Translator is a team within Microsoft Research that focuses on natural language processing. The Microsoft Translator technology is used by Bing Translator, in Internet Explorer and in Office 2010.

So what exactly is technology anyway?
How are you reading this session abstract? Is it created with technology? Is the attendee badge you are wearing technology? One of the definitions of advanced technology is you will not notice it is there. It will blend into everyday life. With this concept in mind, Dr. Neil will discuss how we can move the technology we are building to the next level and become unnoticed by our users.
Come to this session to be awakened by the reality of what we are all creating in this world and learn how we can extend the reach of our technology into the everyday lives of our users.

If you would like to hear one of these presentations, please get in touch.

Where Is Dr. Neil?

This question is being asked so much at the moment I decided to recreate the Where Was Dr. Neil web page. As the Virtual Earth team removed support for the older (less than 3 years old!) version of Virtual Earth, the old site was broken and I have not had the energy to repair it.

In the last month I received more than a dozen emails asking where I am, so I decided to rebuild the page using the new Virtual Earth Silverlight control. the Virtual Earth Silverlight control was announced (again for the third year) at Mix09 last month. It took less than a couple of hours yesterday evening to put this page together. 

One of the things that I have always seen as very important is the ability to customize the experience with the map. I feel that, while the Silverlight Virtual Earth control lacks some of the functionality I might like to see in a full GIS system, it does provide a great new opportunity to build rich mapping experiences.

You can now track me again here.

MIX'd up in the economy

Coming way from MIX I have a nagging feeling that all these great new technical previews (CTPs) that Microsoft has released and announced will not get used as much as they might have in the past.

It is clear that the economy is in trouble, attendance at the MIX event seemed to be down and many of the attendees I spoke to told me that last year their company paid for the trip to the event and this year they had to fund it themselves. Some thought it was worth it, other attendees less so.

With the less stable economic situation software developers need to focus on creating software that they can sell. The CTPs announced and released do not have a license which would allow the software created to be sold or commercialized. I am sure that for special cases Microsoft will do one off deals, for the majority of developers this technology is useless until it ships with a license. 

So what should Microsoft do? I think they need to keep the transparency and show case where they are going with the technology. It would be great if they could provide more solid ideas of timeframes in which the technologies will have a license, along with the pricing models.

In the mean time I expect most of the software developer community will focus on building solutions that they can actually sell and use for commercial benefit.

MIX Essentials Austria and Denmark

Since announcing that I will not be presenting at ReMix Australia I have been asked to present Windows Live developer sessions at Mix Essentials in Austria and Copenhagen.
Looking forward to getting back to both of these cities at the end of May.
If you are going to be at either of these events feel free to drop me a note and we can meet up.

Dr. Neil's Notes 50

Welcome to Dr. Neil's Notes Show 50

A chat with the ScreenEdit crew.

Happy Coding!

Dr. Neil's Notes 49

Welcome to Dr. Neil's Notes Show 49

Warning lower than average recording quality, sorry.

A week of travel.
TechEd South East Asia in Kuala Lumpur, 2 sessions on the Windows Live Platform
Mix UK, a session on designing user happiness.

Feedback on the ViaWindowsLive site.
A call for participation, get involved in the community.

Happy Coding!

TechEd South East Asia

I am just heading out of Singapore now and spent the day in Kuala Lumpur at TechEd South East Asia. I gave two presentations this morning on the Windows Live development platform. The first session was an overview of the Live Services and I did a demo of the new ScreenEdit site. The new ScreenEdit site uses Live Id, Live Search, plugs into Live Spaces and pulls content from Silverlight Streaming.
The second session was a more detailed look at Virtual Earth and Live Search.
I am now heading to Mix UK for some fun with Developers and Designers tomorrow :)

Australia Remixed

This week has been overflowing with action. After landing in Sydney I flew to Melbourne last Sunday for Australia's Remix event. A compressed rerun of all things good at MIX 07 that happened a couple of months ago in Las Vegas.

I presented a session on Windows Live Services to a crowded but tiny room. It was hard to get everything in and we ran over just a bit ;)

I met heaps of people, some old friends, some new, including Stephen Price from LittleVoices.com. Stephen is a cartonnist and a software developer (amongst other talents) and he saw fit to put his new Wacom tablet to task and draw a little cartoon of me and my gadgets.

On one hand I like his idea of drawing cartoons of the geeks he meets, on the other hand I dont know where he gets the idea that I have so many gadgets, on the other hand I do have planety of mobile business utilities, on the other hand..... :)

Now I must get back to work, there is some serious fun going on right now with Live Services and Silverlight, but more on that later....

WebJamin' at Remix Aus

According to Michael Kordahi of the Microsoft evangelism team I am "the most connected and community focused person on planet earth"

Michael, flattery will get you places, and of course I am more than happy to tell people about Webjam @ ReMix Melbourne in June.

Webjam is where (16) people present something interesting that they’ve done online to the crowd. They only get 3 mins to present. There’s SMS voting, then at the end of the night a winner is chosen. It’s set at a bar and is very casual and a lot of fun. More info on Michael's blog and on the Webjam site.

If you have something you would like to show off, get in touch with the WebJam folks to reserve your presentation slot now.

Sounds like it should be good fun.

Conference season has started

Last week I was in Las Vegas (yeh baby!) for MIX and MEDC.
Doing 2 conferences that overlap was ambitious but it worked out great. I met so many amazing people and had fantastic conversations about technology, the future of the web, and heaps of other topics.
I also got to see some very cool new projects.
My friends from the ScreenEdit team in the UK were also there, recording plenty of conversation and points of view. Look out for the interviews appearing on the site soon.
So what other conferences do I plan to attend this year?

• TechEd in Orlando
• ReMix Australia in Melbourne
• TechEd Australia on the Gold Coast (yes the site uses Flash - can you believe it?)
• DevConnections Las Vegas

Maybe I will see you at one of these events?