Best of MIX09

Summary: My favorite presentations from the MIX09 conference.

If you are interested in design and web technologies, but did not have a chance to attend MIX09 (the annual Microsoft conference focusing on design and web technologies), here are some of the free online presentations that I would recommend.

Best talks

If you do not have much time, just watch just these two presentations (they both focus on design):

• Web Form Design (74:36)
  by Luke Wrobleski, Senior Director of Product Design, Yahoo!
  This session focuses on the most common design mistakes and introduces 10 best practices for web form design. The presentation covers such topics as form organization, alignment rules, input validation, using help and tips, progress indicators, error reporting, and more.


• Ten Ways to Ensure RIA Failure (39:34)
  by Anthony Franco, President, EffectiveUI
  Great (and short) talk focusing on what NOT to do in web design and development. My favorite points include:

  "If you're looking to fail, trust developers to make good design decisions."

  As well as:

  "If you're looking to fail, value the process over the product."

The following presentations mostly focus on design, development, deployment, and security:

Design

• Interactive Prototyping with DHTML (75:11)
  by Bill Scott, Director UI Engineering, Netflix
  Bill is a co-author of Designing Web Interfaces, an excellent book for web designers and developers. This talk offers many tips and recommendations on prototyping techniques and related topics, such as CSS frameworks. Great references also.


• Design Prototyping: Bringing Wireframes to Life (59:49)
  by Dan Harrelson, Senior Technologist, Adaptive Path
  Dan Harrelson explains how to build great prototypes. After watching this presentation, I learned that I could easily created interactive (animated) prototypes in PowerPoint (did you know that?). (Bonus: Dan also published a list of prototyping tools.)


• Advance Your Design with UX Design Patterns (69:17)
  by Ambrose Little, User Experience Designer, Infragistics
  Ambrose goes over common UI design patterns. Helpful references include Quince, a design pattern aggregator.

Development

• Microsoft ASP.NET: Taking AJAX to the Next Level (70:11)
  by Stephen Walther, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
  As always, Stephen delivers a great talk on ASP.NET AJAX development.


• Web Development Using Microsoft Visual Studio: Now and in the Future (77:07)
  by Jeff King, Program Manager (Visual Studio), Microsoft
  Good overview of new features and capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. MSDeploy was new to me (see around 65 min).


• Choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC (65:34)
  by Rachel Appel, Wintellect
  This presentation illustrates the differences between two ASP.NET frameworks: Web Forms and MVC (you can skip the first part -- intro and history -- if you're familiar with classic ASP and Web Forms).


• Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3 (75:24)
  by Brad Abrams, Product Unit Manager (Application Framework), Microsoft
  Good demo of Silverlight 3 capabilities appropriate for business app development (no multimedia crap or spinning buttons).

Deployment

• Developing and Deploying Applications on Internet Information Services (IIS) (72:40)
  by Thomas Deml, Group Program Manager (Web Platform and Tools), Microsoft
  Overview of changes and new capabilities of IIS7 (interesting new deployment techniques: see around 47 min).

Security

• Securing Web Applications (75:30)
  by Eric Lawrence, Security Program Manager (Internet Explorer), Microsoft
  This talk is more about IE 8 features, but it still raises a few interesting points about web application security.