The screen saver that loads Twitter posts and Flickr photos that I mentioned briefly in my first MIX post is available at http://blogs.msdn.com/karstenj/archive/2007/04/30/the-debut-of- flittrbook.aspx.

My session went pretty well yesterday, but unfortunately I had quite a few demo issues. The session before mine went late, which made me pressed for time to get things plugged up and ready to go. The first problem was that they didn’t have my presentation pre-loaded on the presentation computer. So I spent a few minutes looking for it, and then finally gave up, plugged in my USB key to the back of the machine and just loaded it. Problem 1 solved, but it got my nerves in a bit of a tizzy so I didn’t quite start with the bang I wanted to.

The A/V guy thought I was ready to go as soon as the presentation was up and so started everything, but I didn’t get a chance to double check that my demo laptop was working properly and that the demos were going to be displayed correctly. Big mistake. When it came time to do my demos, I couldn’t get any signal from the laptop to the displays. I fiddled with it for what seemed like an eternity, but in the end made the executive decision to just continue on so I could make it through the core content. One problem with doing demos from Vista machines is that I can never freaking find the right place to look to change settings. It’s very frustrating, and when you’re nervous or anxious, it just makes matters worse. For the demos I just did my best to explain the points in the demos verbally, but of course that was a very poor substitute.

To add insult to injury, I offered to show the demos on my laptop after the talk for those that were interested. However, there were a number of questions, and due to the wait and inactivity, Virtual PC stopped cooperating and I couldn’t get anything to display on the demo box. <sigh>

For those of you who were at my session, please accept my sincere apologies for the lack of demos. I had a much better, more cohesive presentation planned. Hopefully the extended Q&A was useful. Judging from the number of great questions and business cards I got for follow up info, people still got something out of the session.

I will be at the Mix Chat and attending various sessions throughout the rest of the conference. If you want to chat with me, catch up with me at the conference, or send me an email to set up some time to talk while we’re here.

I was very serious when I said that I’d like to start conversations with everybody about their SharePoint experiences. We very much want to understand where you perceive the problems to be so that we can address them. Believe it or not, it’s not always as obvious to us as it is to you what we should do. So we very much value your feedback!

Despite my better judgment and my vehement opposition of most things “web 2.0,” I now have a Twitter account. See my tweets at http://twitter.com/tylerbutler. I feel dirty… At least I’m not on myspace…

To expand on my post from earlier about .Net in the browser, here’s some of the more salient points from the demos that Scott Guthrie et. al. showed:

Debugging in both Windows and Mac

Yup, you can attach to a remote process running on the Mac, and step into breakpoints in your managed code locally in VS. This must have been really hard to build. Nonetheless, this is super useful.

**Code behind for Silverlight projects **

This is basically how you get your .Net code in the browser. As far as I can tell, your XAML has an associated code-behind page that contains all of your code, as in pretty much all of ASP.Net

**Integration between Expression and VS for inserting XAML into the Silverlight project from Expression **

You can easily use the best app for the specific job. Designers can crack open the XAML in Expression and munge it, then developers can live in VS and just write the code. Everybody wins.

**Add Silverlight projects to ASP.Net projects, get them built and deployed together **

Silverlight controls can be just like regular .Net controls, and get built as part of the same development workflow. Sweeeeeet…

http://silverlight.metaliq.com/topbanana/

Really nifty light table app completely in the browser built in C# and XAML and delivered via Silverlight. Apparently this will be a sample app that will be part of the SDK or something, which is pretty sweet. I was hoping it’d be live so everyone could play, but it’s not. Built in a month with alpha Silverlight 1.1 code.

Wahoo, .Net in the browser just announced with integration in Silverlight. The crowd goes wild…