Jeroens blog

Last weekend I attended Semantic MediaWiki Camp (SMWC) 2009 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Both days of the event contained very interesting presentations about SMW and various related extensions. The most exciting aspect of the event for me was perhaps getting to know other SMW developers, including Markus Kr̦tzsch and Denny Vrandecic, the two lead SMW developers. And of course, I finally met Yaron Koren, my GSoC 2009 mentor, which was really nice. He also brought my long awaited Google T-shirts Рyay!

On Saturday, I gave a presentation about Maps and Semantic Maps, after which I did get quite some nice feedback about the extensions. I also got some interesting proposals for new functionality.

During the two nights I was in Karlsruhe, I stayed at Robert U, a student working at Ontoprise, the company hosting the event, his place, sparing me the rather expensive hotel costs.

This picture is from during one of the first talks. Yaron is explaining Semantic Forms. I’m the guy with red training right in front of the camera.

Remix is a Microsoft event I attended yesterday that focuses on what’s coming next on the web. I arrived half an hour late due to some problems with the public transportation, but still was able to see the biggest part of the keynote.

I’m really happy I attended it, cause I learned about quite some things I didn’t know about yet. There where 2 tracks you could follow: designer (UX) and developer. I of-course followed the dev track. The main focus was on Silverlight 3, the latest version of microsoft’s answer to technologies such as Flash and Google Web Toolkit. From what I’ve seen, which included some impressive demo’s, I concluded that Silverlight 3, together with the development tools that are needed for it, probably form the most advanced set of RIA development sets out there. I’ve been considering getting into it for quite a while now, and still can’t decide due to the pretty important drawbacks that come with choosing Silverlight. These include the fact that Silverlight is as much Microsoft as it can be, making it a very improbably candidate for most open source projects, the costs of all the dev tools, and the Silverlight client required for you to be able to view a Silverlight site. There also where presentations about the involved development tools, which are Expression Studio 3, and Visual Studio 2008. A few very nice demo’s of Expression Blend 3, part of Expression Studio, where given, introducing the public to the basics of control, template and style creation, as well as things like animation and import options.

At some point in a demo, Google was used to demonstrate an SEO aspect of a Silverlight app. A few moments later the following entry appeared on the remix2009 twitter channel: Attention Steve Ballmer; A Microsoft employee is using Google. This drew a laugh from most of the public.

Although FOSDEM is way cooler, I’m already looking forward to MS Remix 2010.