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I spent the first half of last week at the ().

The ´óÏó´«Ã½ made some announcements (), but the rest of the conference highlighted a number of forthcoming technologies that will no doubt be of interest to the Mashup Community:

Microsoft Vista
From the product's conception, Microsoft has expressed a very public goal with Vista to bring Internet content "out of the browser" and onto the desktop. Clearly web services, feeds and API's are at the heart of the mechanisms that power this concept, and of course that's of interest to everyone who's participating in this environment.

The mechanisms through which this vision is realised include the Vista Sidebar (think OS X widgets but on Windows) and Windows Presentation Foundation (aka WPF, aka Avalon) – a new way of creating mashup-like short-time-to-market applications.

Windows Presentation Format – aka Avalon
WPF is a new display engine that is packed with the WinFX component of Vista. Most of the application is represented by XAML (a new markup language worth learning), which seems quick to learn but powerfully rich.

You can read more about WPF on the or access the .

Windows Presentation Format – Everywhere
Microsoft claims WPF/E to be a cross-platform, cross-device version of WPF. It's designed to run in a browser, and Microsoft were keen to demonstrate it working in both Firefox and also Safari on OS X.

It looks like Microsoft's attempt to produce a rival product to Flash, but like WPF is powered by XAML and Javascript rather then a compiled binary. It has it's own DOM model which can be manipulated by existing Javascript libraries modified to traverse the WPF/E DOM within the document's parent DOM.

Atlas
Essentially a free AJAX framework from Microsoft, it seems to be heavily geared up for use with ASP.net – however it appears that it will work with our languages, including non Microsoft ones. I'm not sure what I make of Atlas yet, so I'd be interested in your views! You can find out more about Atlas, and download the latest development version from .

Internet Explorer 7
IE7 will also feature as a main part of Vista, although it appears this will be released before Vista ships (which is expected to be in 2007 now). If you havn't already done so, it's probably worth to ensure your websites continues to be compatible with the latest version of the browser.

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Congratulations to Steve Drew, who has won the Flickr Hacks competition we recently posted to the .

We're all up for accountability here at the ´óÏó´«Ã½, and so we're pleased to offer – just to prove everything was above board!

(hmm, the sound and the video seems to have lost sync during encoding...)

Steve wins a copy of the recently published .

Congratulations from all of us here on the backstage.bbc.co.uk project!

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I don't know how many of you are going to be at
but the schedule, which has just been announced, has several ´óÏó´«Ã½ speakers and ´óÏó´«Ã½ related topics.

Matt Biddulph [ex ´óÏó´«Ã½/] will be revealing more behind an upcoming ´óÏó´«Ã½ protoype; . Chief Backstager, Tom Loosemore has come up with; and will be showing off some, up til now, internal TV related prototypes. Our Radio and Music colleague; Tristan Ferne is revealing more about his team's annotatable [currently internal only] audio project/prototype; and frequent Backstage email listers; David Wood and Brendan Quinn are going to talk, for the first time I think, about their work on content management systems at the ´óÏó´«Ã½; . Finally Paul Hammond (also from our Radio and Music team) has the intriguingly titled; .

The conference, which is in Amsterdam also features heaps on microformats, AJAX, Info Clouds and the Semantic Web.

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by Jem Stone

Ian Forrester [] kicked this one off, a few months back, by asking this on his blog; back in January. Mario Menti who's been experiementing with around news feeds/tv listings had a conversation with fellow lister; was pointed to Ian's post and developed this; a . The result is a bot now working across a number of IM clients. This might potentially be a solution to freer access to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Persian.com.
You can see a screenshot at

James Holden has developed the which in an alternative to Matthew Somerville's take on trying to visually represent how our services/editorial decisions evolve and change over time.

Apologies for the failing to update a couple of times this week.

has been and has been feeding us emails of new launches, developments and gossips. Ben's highlight was this; Ray Ozzie's [from Microsoft] announcement of a

And whilst we're at it, you might be interested in some of the experiments that Tristan Ferne [one of my colleagues from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio and Music Interactive team] has been having with the iTunes signature maker. He's developed some nifty s. [inspired by the fuss over the decision to stop playing the UK Theme every morning on Radio 4.]

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I"ve mentioned this a couple of times on the Backstage email list but the first of three ´óÏó´«Ã½ Innovation Labs to be held this month is underway in Yorkshire (the other two are in Manchester and Sussex). You can see blogs of the participants, a Flickr stream and the original ideas and briefs at . If you dig very deep you can see pictures of me. Sorry.

More Labs are planned for later on this year. I know some Backstage contributors/subscribers will be participating in 1 or 2 of the labs and we'd be grateful for any feedback.

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