Explore new horizons in web development & design

Keynote Address

Keynote Address: Brian Goldfarb - Group Product Manager - Microsoft Corporation
Brian Goldfarb, Group Product Manager, will be kicking off ReMIX 07, discussing Microsoft's continued commitment and investments in the Web and investments in Web technologies such as Silverlight and Expression, which are Microsoft's latest tools and technologies that will make it easier for developers, designers and business professionals to deliver revolutionary new experiences on the Web. Along the way, we will be demonstrating some examples from early adopters in Australia. It's a session not to be missed!

Rapid Fire Design and Prototyping in WPF
Lee Brimelow, Frog Design (USA)
Join Lee Brimelow as he delves into the process he uses to rapidly design and prototype applications using WPF and Blend. He will be deconstructing prototypes created when he first began learning WPF and contrasting them to his more recent work created for clients such as Yahoo!. Lee will also talk in-depth about the designer-developer workflow and how WPF has changed it for the better.

SharePoint - bringing sexy back!
Angus Logan, Microsoft Australia
SharePoint Technologies can run entire .com sites that need to be hot - and they can be! Back in the day (2003) when SharePoint Technologies was used primarily as an Intranet/Extranet technology having a fairly standard user interface design was OK - don't base your SharePoint UX experience from 2003 lots of things have changed to meet new needs. During this session you will understand what Microsoft Office SharePoint Server gives you out of the box and how we can turn that into a unique snowflake through Custom Master Pages, CSS and rich media platforms such as Silverlight.

Building Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and JavaScript
Laurence Moroney, Microsoft Corporation
This session will introduce Silverlight and its overall architecture. It will detail XAML and how XAML is used to create a user interface. The Expression tools (design and blend) will be introduced and how they fit Silverlight will be detailed. Finally, a review of the Silverlight JavaScript APIs will be performed, with examples on how a custom media player can be designed in XAML and implemented in JavaScript with Silverlight.

Put Your Assets on the Big Screen with Windows Media Center
Jason Suess, Microsoft Corporation
The TV is still arguably the most important screen in the household. It's in the front room in the house, it's where the family congregates, and it's the screen people use during their leisure time. For all these reasons delivering digital entertainment (especially long format content) to this screen makes a lot of sense. Come learn about the vision for Media Center, the business opportunity for third parties, and the steps to bringing you assets to the TV by leveraging the Media Center platform. We'll also talk about early work that has been done on interactive advertising models for monetizing your content on Media Center.

Switching to WPF and Silverlight
Lucas Sherwood, Lightmaker
After recently completing two real world application builds in Silverlight and WPF, we will talk about the real challenges that we faced during the development process. Our aim is to address the issue facing developers as they begin to tackle these technologies and to dispel some of the myths surrounding them.

WPF and Sliverlight are still fairly new technologies and it does help to know what you are getting yourself in to, so that your development will be relatively pain free. In this session, we will share our thoughts on how we would try different approaches next time and avoid some of the pitfalls.

Lightmaker (Australia) will unveil two major new Silverlight enabled experiences currently under development.

Building Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and JavaScript
Laurence Moroney, Microsoft Corporation
This session will introduce Silverlight and its overall architecture. It will detail XAML and how XAML is used to create a user interface. The Expression tools (design and blend) will be introduced and how they fit Silverlight will be detailed. Finally, a review of the Silverlight JavaScript APIs will be performed, with examples on how a custom media player can be designed in XAML and implemented in JavaScript with Silverlight.

PHP and Microsoft
Steve Marx, Microsoft Corporation
Learn how IIS is fast becoming the best platform for PHP, and see the latest web UX technologies such as Silverlight and the Microsoft AJAX Library on top of PHP.

Windows Live Mashups
Dr Neil Roodyn
Windows Live Services provide some interesting opportunities to mix data, content and interfaces to create the new generation of software mashups. One of the first Windows Live developer MVPs, Dr. Neil, will present this session on how you can best take advantage of the Windows Live services and create valuable assets both online and offline.

Building Silverlight Applications with .NET
Laurence Moroney, Microsoft Corporation
In this session I will cover how neatly Silverlight fits in with the .NET framework. As Silverlight applications are based on XAML, which is XML, I will cover using Expression to create XAML templates. These templates will then be used to generate data-bound content from a SQL Server database for presentation to the client. I will cover the XML APIs in .NET, the Web services APIs and how they can be used to expose XAML services via JSON.

Extending the reach of your applications
John-Daniel Trask, Mindscape, New Zealand
In the past data contained within an application was only available through a limited number of predefined interfaces. Contrast this to the scenario today where users demand to see data in a myriad of formats and want to use it where it makes the most sense for them. At times this will be through a web site, a dedicated client application or provided as a data source for another application altogether. Come to this session to learn about mechanisms to surface data from within an application and some useful design patterns that assist in this process.

Orcas for Web Developers
Philip Beadle, Readify and Dave Glover, Microsoft Australia
See how Visual Studio codename "Orcas" takes Web development to the next level. See a demo-filled tour of all improvements in Visual Studio around ASP.NET and AJAX development. Topics covered include a new standards-based design surface for XHTML and CSS, Intellisense for JavaScript, tools for ASP.NET AJAX, and more.

Panel: The future of web applications
John Allsop, Web Directions
More panellists to be announced soon...

Build your own video site.
Steve Marx, Microsoft Corporation
Bringing together Expression, ASP .NET AJAX, Silverlight and Media Server to build your own video site.

Converging brand experiences across multiple platforms: what our audiences are expecting.
Australian Interactive Media Industry Association(AIMIA) National Executive, Guy Gadney
While the number of devices and new media platforms continues to grow and fragment, the brands that people experience are converging. Audiences want to experience their TV show on the television, online, on mobiles, i-pods and not yet invented technologies. How does this business model work? How are users interacting with this experience, and what is the impact for the Australian new media development community? Guy will boldly attempt to answer these questions with reference both to his role as President of AIMIA, and General Manager of PBL Media looking after Channel Nine, ninemsn and ACP Magazines.

WPF Fundamentals: Developing Rich Interactive Applications
Joseph Cooney, Paradigm Development
Learn about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and how you can use it to develop great applications. This session shows how WPF can help you deliver rich and engaging applications that are easy to deploy with unlimited potential for visualising information. Walk away understanding the fundamentals of XAML mark-up and the WPF programming model: layout, controls, documents, media, 2d, 3d, and data-binding. Also find out how XAML and Microsoft's latest tool offerings Visual Studio "Orcas" and Expression Blend helps designers and developers work together, empowering designers to independently create an application's user interface at the same time that a developer builds its logic and functionality.

Modular CSS: Creating flexible, hack-free and browser-stable CSS
Russ Weakley, Max Design
A clearly explained modular system that allows you to hide and show CSS rules to specific browsers without the need for extensive hacks or workarounds.

Expression Media Encoder
Christian Schorman, Microsoft Corporation

Building standards compliant sites
John-Daniel Trask, Mindscape, New Zealand
In this presentation you will learn about some of the common standards pitfalls that you encounter in your work while discussing how tools such as Microsoft Expression Web can solve these common problems. We will also cover why standards are important and how to streamline your development pipeline by making it easier for designers and developers to work together.

Designing with Microsoft Expression Web: Today and Tomorrow
Michael Kordahi, Microsoft Australia.
Microsoft Expression Web 1.0 is still hot off the presses. Come and get in-depth tips and tricks on this great standards-based design tool. In addition, get a preview of the direction we're taking as version 2.0 expands its universe beyond HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and puts Silverlight, PHP, and ASP.NET within reach.

Unlocking, Taming and Selling your Digital Assets: with Microsoft Expression Media
Adrian Treahy, Gecko Images
The digital image market has been changing rapidly and in so doing fundamental change has confronted professional photographers, designers and writers. Diversify or die is the modern business catch-phrase and photographers must thinking about how to develop, grow and manage a multi-revenue business. How? Through the power of Microsoft Expression Media and Gekko's e-Commerce engine a dynamic new marketplace for selling and managing non-commission sales is a reality for hundreds of professional photographers, writers and designers. Adrian will discuss the market forces at play and demonstrate how Expression Media has been a central platform enabling Gekko to build a highly effective online business now servicing many of Australia's leading professional photographers and advertising agencies.

Panel
Details to be announced soon...

Rocket Science - at scale! Operating Large-scale consumer websites: a view from the frontline
Damian Smith, General Manager - Digital Media, Network TEN
Operating a large-scale, year-round consumer web presence is a challenging task. Much of the discussion about web 2.0, and the supposed disappearance of barriers to entry for web businesses, ignores the size of the operational challenges. Expertise, repeatable process, tools and infrastructure are not easily found, and working with experienced, reliable partners is vital. Damian Smith will provide some examples from experience with TEN Digital and LookSmart.

Popfly for fun (and profit)
Nick Hodge, Microsoft Australia
Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups. Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

Go Deep with AJAX
Steve Marx, Microsoft Corporation
Look under the surface at ASP.NET AJAX, and learn best practices for designing/developing great UX, maximizing performance, and considering accessibility and search engine optimization in your web applications.

Developer/Designer workflow with Expression
Michael Leahy Wise, Omni Effect & Mark Sehler & Mark Smith, MYOB.

Closing Panel: Designers are from Venus, Developers are from Mars. (Room 1)
Lee Brimelow, Frog Design, USA
More panelists to be announced soon...