Moonlight at the Boston Remix Conference

On Monday I joined Brad on stage at the Boston Remix conference to show a preview of Moonlight.

As you can imagine, after years of working on Mono, I was pretty excited to be able to show our work at a Microsoft event.

Brad blogged a summary of all the things that he showed on his keynote here. I was familiar with some of the stuff there, but there were various new things, like the ComponentOne controls for Silverlight 1.1 (they are similar in spirit to Flex: you get some high-level controls that you can use with your Silverlight applications).

Videos of the keynote have been posted, see this page for the videos. The Moonlight section is covered here.

I was running development versions of both Mono and Moonlight (SVN as of 24 hours or so) and you can see that some of the performance tuning that has been going into the Mono runtime (Paolo has not blogged about it, but Mono 1.2.6 will have plenty of performance improvements in the JIT and the memory consumption keeps going down).

I showed the Chess game and you can see from the numbers that Mono running Chess is now getting similar scores as the .NET runtime gets on similar hardware.

Brad also gave us a copy of TopBanana in advance, and everyone in the team worked hard to get it ready for the show:

Lastly, I got a chance to show the Compiz Cube to the audience while playing some videos with Moonlight from the Halo web site.

It was the old cube, the one that we shipped with SLED, but still it makes for a good demo. On my Tuesday session, I borrowed a machine that had more up-to-date software to show the latest Compiz.

Q and A on Moonlight

On Tuesday I had a session on Moonlight (the slides are here).

One of the problems that I face with my presentations is that am not good at transitioning from the presentation to the questions and answer part of it. I always enjoy the questions and answers more than the presentation, and somehow I always botch it by reaching the end and asking "Questions?".

This presentation was quite fun, because the audience asked a lot of questions as I did the presentation which made the presentation a lot more interesting than the slide deck shows.

This was mostly a Windows audience, and I took the chance to show them the Linux desktop, the Mono/.NET compatibility, the MonoDevelop IDE, showed internationalization on Unix, the automatic right-to-left support and automatic layout of desktop apps and a few other features of Mono-based apps on Linux.

Silverlight Performance

On Sunday I had the chance to meet Seema Ramchandani who is a performance PM on Silverlight. On her blog she has some useful hints on how to improve the performance of your Silverlight apps (here and here).