Although the software announcements made today were somewhat disappointing (no releases, just more betas, CTPs, and RCs) the cross-platform functionality offered by XNA 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Windows Phone 7 were compelling. A number of partners gave demos today that showcased some of the really interesting new features of Blend 4 Beta [download here] that I will be discussing more later tonight:
- eBay demos Desktop Simple Lister (with help from Cynergy)
- Netflix demos Smooth Streaming on WP7
- Foursquare demos location aware services WP7
- Other great demos: Seesmic, Major League Soccer, and Shazaam
Another big announcement was that they’ve open sourced the Silverlight media framework, that was used to deliver the smooth-streaming HD experience for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games. The code is available at http://smf.codeplex.com
The focus was very strong on targeting multiple platforms that support Silverlight or XNA with a single code-base. This ubiquity of development has always been a major goal for Microsoft and so-far the case they’ve made is very compelling. I can’t wait to dig into the nuts and bolts of it and post more developer and designer focused analysis.