Event Recap: RIAPalooza – Chicago, May 30th-31st, 2008
My coworker Mark Tovey and I got back from a 1.5 day event in Chicago, RIAPalooza. (For the record I pronounce it “arr eye ay”, not “reeyah”) He’s already written his recap. I’ll give it my shot here.
The event’s site described the event as such:
RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.
Overall, it delivered as promised, the informal, community feeling was definitely there. The Friday night session and the QA that followed it were lively and really quite good. I’ll give a brief overview of each session.
Drinking & Thinking
Dave is obviously a charismatic and intelligent fellow. His admittedly quickly put together presentation was actually very good because of this, the somewhat dry materials could have been abysmal in the hands of a less capable presenter. That said, his recap of the state of RIA was thorough and poignant. Though this event was to be PowerPoint free he definitely was using Keynote. *wink wink* After he was done, the QA session got heated. Very quickly it became apparent that the MS and Adobe truce under this event was shaky at best. That said, it was good to get some things out in the air early. Everyone maintained their decorum even after a couple Goose Island beers
: RIA for Designers and Developers (Keynote)
Calling this first presentation of the day the “keynote” was a bit of a stretch, it got very tactical very quickly. A nuts and bolts demo of Expression Blend, the 101 approach was appreciated, but maybe not appropriate given that RIAPalooza wasn’t meant to be a forum for a commercial. Both Corinna and Tim are very capable WPF/Silverlight platform designers and developers so it was good to see a quick collaboration session, but their very tool specific pitch came across a little canned.
How RIA Changes In Application Design
Geoff works for RoundArch, arguably the RIA darlings of the Chicago marketplace, he gave a great presentation that showed the progression of RIA design and when and how to design or deploy specific technologies to match the project’s requirements. He mentioned the differences between a few AJAX frameworks and the Flex, eschewing slamming Silverlight directly. He did say he didn’t feel it was ready for primetime, though. My sentiments exactly.
Best and Worst Practices Building a RIA
A bit of a Abbot and Costello of RIA design, this comedic duo hammed it up and it paid off. Probably the most engaging presentation of the day, the 10 best and 10 worst practices in RIA design and development is a presentation I want to download and review with my teammates. Very valuable tips in that one, indeed. Josh played the MS side and Michael was squarely on the Adobe side.
Lunch and Open Mic
Fast. Smart. Agile. User Experience Driven Agile Development
Some serious AJAX flexing here, no Flex. 
Matt’s attention to detail and sheer scope of the projects he discussed made me reconsider a little bit about the types of projects you might want to attempt in AJAX. Lots of data being pushed through logistic systems and a variety of other RIAs. He stressed some agile practices, many of which I had never really thought could be successfully applied to a JavaScript powered project due to the lack of true OOP or managed code. I definitely got some good insight here.
: Better Designer/Developer Collaboration with WPF & XAML
Anthony’s candor and approach made the session a fun one to watch. I had no insight into the creative end of a Silverlight project and he handedly displayed a mastery of the toolset to produce an RIA that simply did not look like a typical RIA with canned components. It was refreshing.
Sugar Break
: Silverlight and RIA
Unfortunately, in my opinion, the same could not be said of Anthony’s coworker, Corey. Corey showed the Visual Studio side of Silverlight and while it was interesting to see the distinct similarities between XAML and MXML, his lack of knowledge of their similarities led to him losing credibility in my view. He mentioned that he used to be a Flash developer, but that must have been back in Flash 5 or Flash MX days. Given that we had just seen the fun part of Silverlight, and had already been given a presentation on Visual Studio and RIA, it may have been better to give this before Anthony’s presentation or maybe as part of a longer one by Tim and Corinna.
Agile Flex Application Development
The last session of the day, ka Wei Cheung from WeAreMammoth showed us all this sexy new ASP.Net code generator and CMS engine his team is working on, X20. Wow. I will be keeping my eyes on that space, indeed. Very powerful, fast and slick. Hope it doesn’t cost to much when it comes out.
: Closing Remarks – Building RIA Community
Mark won a copy of VisualStudio, woot!
In closing, the event was a resounding success for me. I had never had such detailed demos on Silverlight given by live people. Has it changed my opinion on it? I wouldn’t necessarily say that. However, I will continue to keep my eye on the space, possibly contemplate putting a proper Windows partition on my machine large enough for the expression suite (no one there seemed to think Blend was coming to MacOS anytime soon) and maybe even try porting some of my Flash/Flex stuff over to *gasp* Silverlight. Why? Partially to try out some of the cooler parts of blend and Silverlight, partially to prepare for the inevitable “We want a Sliverlight site”, etc from clients.
I enjoyed the day and thoroughly recommend it to others to attend the next time it rolls around… Maybe I’ll even submit a proposal for a session if they open up the speaker list before hand. How about you… Were you there? What did you think?
Posted on June 1, 2008