#WPIEBCVan

27Mar11

Yesterday I was at the Microsoft bootcamp for HTML5 showcasing IE9 and Windows Phone 7 app development at BCIT. I hadn’t done anything that had me filled with such nerd love in a while. If IE9 and Windows Phone 7 were a person, I would totally lust after them from afar. The day was split into two sections with the first dealing with HTML5 and IE9, and the second dealing with Windows Phone 7 app development.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) – HTML5 and IE9

I had felt like I knew most of the ins and outs of HTML5 but obviously after listening to Morten, I most definitely do not. There are parts that I’ve played around with, others that I haven’t and he really did open my eyes on how to use them, namely SVG. Mention graphics and I tend to run the other way but I think I may dabble in it’s pool of vectors and see what I come up with.

Next he talked about IE9 and this is where I very impressed. Having been using OSX for the last few months I have completely left IE9 alone. Even when I was using my PC I still used Opera or Chrome so this was my first taster of all the new features. I want to first mention just how fast IE9 seems to be. During the presentation Morten was switching back and forth between his slide show to live examples of what ever he was talking about and on most occasions he just started up a new instance of IE9 and bam, it was just there. At one point he had clicked Firefox by mistake and in the time it took for that load a page he had started IE9, showed what he was talking about and back to slideshow. Somebody said it was Firefox 4, which was very bad.

Now onto PINNED SITES!! This feature in itself I just want to have a Windows environment at hand again. Essentially with some meta tags a web developer can make their website a “native” Windows application using IE9′s engine. To install the application the user just has to drag the currently opened tab to the task bar and bam, applicationed.

That’s really just the basics to it but it’s so easy to do and cool to boot. It can be further extended to allow for notifications for RSS feeds to Twitter/Facebook. Not only that, if there’s a media player on the page you can add more tags to gain Windows Media Player functionality for the task bar, i.e. pause, play, next.

Atley Hunter (@atleyhunter) – Windows Phone 7.

In the past I have dabbled in some iOS and Symbian development but nothing serious, just trying to get a feel for it. One thing that has slowed me down is the initial, what goes where and what does it do. Even for the simplest app of Hello World on iOS has a stupid amount of code to do it. So that’s why I was a little blown back by seeing Windows Phone 7 development for the first time, it’s essential XML and C#. Both of which I have worked with and I am happy to look at. Hello World is essentially changing an XML tag from the automatically generated code when you start project. Bam. Done.

Overall it was a very good day out in BCIT, even if I did miss most of the lovely sunny day that was happening outside. If you’re interested in either of these topics there are actually other events and competitions happening soon to dive into:

Make Web Not War - One of Canada’s first cross-platform conference showcasing the latest techniques and technologies available to the ever-evolving web community, jointly sponsored by Microsoft and Open Source communities across Canada.
The Great Canadian Apportunity – Windows Phone 7 competition – “What if you had the chance to create an innovative app or game for a visually-stunning, developer-friendly mobile platform, and win some incredible prizes in the process?”

Also, got a well cool t-shirt. It made me lol. Here’s a photo of it, also note my professional pose. :p