Today I was down in Reading for Slide 7, which I have been looking forward to since I booked my place on it in May. We went down on Rob's magic bus last night, and stayed the night at Travelodge Reading M4 Eastbound. I had booked this for £15 for the night as they had a special offer. The room I got was fantastic. It was very large with a double bed and a bathroom. I made a mistake this morning however as I went down to the Moto service station which adjoined the Travelodge and spend £7.49 on a full English and about £3.12 on a cup of tea! I don't know how service stations can charge so much for breakfast. I realise prices are higher because of the long hours people have to work in Services, plus travelling for employees is more difficult than for most, plus the fact that it is a mere convenience, so I suppose I realise why they can charge so much.
Anyhoo, I went back to Travelodge's main reception to meet the others, and it was back on the Magic Bus for the conference. We arrived and had complementary tea, coffee and biscuits before starting the conference. The first talk was by Mark Quirk. This was an introduction to the day. His keynote contained information about Web 2.0, its applications, and a bit on the future of Web, such as going beyond the browser and Web 3.0. He showed us some samples of Web 2.0 in action. These included Windows Live! Maps and HMV's media player. After this talk, we took a comfort break, where there were more refreshments. I then went to the Introduction to ASP .NET by Ed Dunhill. This talk was good with demonstrations using Microsoft Expressions Blend. It was then time for Lunch, after which I went to Rob's talk. As usual Rob delivered the talk while cracking a joke on average every two minutes. He demonstrated how to create a web service using Visual Studio 2005 and created two small programs, one which would send a message and the other which would receive the message and display it on-screen. When this program worked, we all applauded wildly, apparently for no real reason other than so the noise would spill into the next theatre. Rob was demonstrating how web services could be used in mobile development (or not). When his talk had finished,Martin Parry came and talked about Windows Live! Services including Virtual Maps, Hotmail and Live Spaces, Microsoft's blogging and social networking service, similar to MySpace. After another comfort break, we all came together for the last talk which was on Microsoft Silverlight by Mark Johnston. This talk was one of the most interesting as we were given the chance to win a graphics tablet, plus Silverlight seems to me to be a cause for excitement in itself because it looks to be directly competing with Adobe Macromedia Flash. One of the things that Silverlight can do is to stream High-Definition Full-screen videos, something that Flash seems to be lacking in at the moment. One of the people there asked whether buttons in Silverlight applications would be able to get the focus using the tab key. This is something I am interested in as I want Silverlight to be accessible to the blind and partially sighted because from past experience, Flash is almost totally inaccessible to those people. At the moment, however Silverlight, cannot create applications whose buttons can get focus, although it should be implemented by the time Silverlight 1.0 comes out. If not, it will be available in Silverlight 1.1 which should follow shortly afterwards. While you can only write Silverlight 1.0 applications in JavaScript, Silverlight 1.1 will utilize the .NET Framework for development, so you can write Silverlight solutions in any .NET programming language, including Visual Basic, C# or C++, and more.
After the final talk, it was time for a barbecue tea, and after a quick competition to win some last minute goodies, completing the evaluation forms, and receiving a goodie bag in return, and the winning of the Microsoft T-shirts, it was time to board the Magic Bus and head back home.
A good day was had by all who attended, and I was able to talk to one of the Microsoft staff about going into access to computers for the Visually Impaired. It seems that I need to contact Redmond as Microsoft UK do not deal with that. I will make contact with Redmond over the summer.
I must say that the staff at Slide 7 were most helpful. When I pointed out that I was Visually Impaired and could I have a seat on the front rowm they were more than happy to oblige. I was also helped to the food and was given help to find a lunch bag. Just to say thank you to everyone at Microsoft UK Campus for the help I recieved today. If the conference is held next year I am definitely going down.
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