Day 3 of MIX was a pretty slow day when compared to the other two, which is to expected with the conference winding down.  There was more of the same focus as seen previously; mostly HTML5/IE9, and WP7.  We learned some more about some of the updates coming in WP7’s Mango update, and got a little more insight in to the future of HTML5 and the IE9.  There was some good information about WP7 application performance (which I covered more in depth here: http://blog.sdbarker.com/2011/04/14/windows-phone-application-performance/), and some talk about how to write maintainable Javascript/jQuery code (which was really all stuff that developers should be doing anyway, for every bit of code that they write.)

Overall, more good information, and a good ending to a great conference!

MIX11 saw a pretty heavy focus on Windows Phone 7 (and specifically the coming Mango update) today. While there are tons and tons of changes, a few that were mentioned repeatedly:

• Fast Application Resume
• Background Agents - Audio, Timed, and Idle background threads
• Notification Service, trigger and schedule notifications just like alarms or calendar items
• Background Transfer Service - Queue file transfers
• Huge advancements in integration with the camera and other sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, gyro)
• SQL CE is coming (with LINQ)
• Sockets, and access to the connection manager
• Serious performance improvements all the way around
• The ability to deep-link to apps, and pin those links as tiles to your homescreen

It looks like Mango is going to be a very significant to the Windows Phone platform for both end users as well as developers.  More on day 2 after the break.

Beyond the WP7 focus, there was a lot more information about the HTML5 technologies that are coming to browsers.  Specifically, one of the sessions was about the <audio /> and <video /> tags.  The HTML5 spec itself, while supporting audio and video tags, doesn’t have support for any kind of streaming specification, though there are a few various options to control streaming.  The most popular of which seems to be Apple’s HLS.  The spec also doesn’t specify a codec that’s required, so you’ll want to specify your codecs to save some time by helping the browser not have to figure out what you’re trying to send.  If you’re going to be using these elements, you’re also going to want to make sure that your web server is set up properly to handle seeking.

Interestingly enough, with all of the WP7 announcements going on throughout the entire keynote, the tail end of the keynote mentioned Kinect.  Kinect has been, evidently, the fastest selling piece of technology in history.  The tech itself is indeed pretty amazing.  The talk about Kinect was pretty limited, though the big piece of news surrounding it was that the Kinect Windows SDK will be released soon.  That was followed with some awesome demos of what the community has hacked Kinect to do.  Apparently this is all more important than they initially let on, because everyone was given a Kinect!

This year I’ll be attending Microsoft’s MIX 11 conference to help bring some of latest standards-based web development techniques and technologies to my employer, Motricity.

The line up this year looks fantastic, with a lot of great sessions and information planned focusing on HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, some Microsoft specific technologies including Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Phone 7, as well as mobile development in general.

It’s going to be a busy and exciting couple of days looking in to the future of mobile development!