The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ is a stock device in literature.  Poe’s main character in The Masque of the Red Death is one instance of the theme.  Mark Twain left us an unfinished novel built around another.  An unexpected guest is central to one of the earliest works in English literature, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  In Plato’s late dialogues, Socrates is replaced by the more enigmatic Xenon or Stranger. The old testament is populated by mysterious guests who turn out to be angels.  The Venetian Carnival always potentially allowed commoners to mix with royalty since everyone was in disguise.  Middle Eastern literature is filled with Tufaylîs or ‘unexpected guests’ who would provide additional entertainment to any party should they be allowed over the threshold.  Medieval troubadours appear to have filled the same function in the West.

At the recent MIX 2011 keynotes in Las Vegas, amidst announcements about HTML5, IE9, ASP.NET MVC 3.x, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone Mango and the Kinect SDK, WPF made such an appearance.  It was never called out, as such, but as each Kinect demo was presented on stage, WPF aficionados were beaming because they recognized their old friend behind the Kinect mask.

• Wall Panic 3000
• Jellybean Armchair

Why WPF?  Because WPF is the natural workhorse for NUI development.  From Kinect hacks to multi-touch displays to Surface technology, it is again and again the technology of choice providing both native integration with low level touch messages on the host OS as well as a powerful programming idiom.  For many of us, it was the technology we learned to do MVVM on.  We get to use the full resources of the .NET Framework with it as well as the ease of development provided by Visual Studio and Blend.

And if we are at the beginning of a NUI renaissance, as my friend Corey Schuman suggests in his MIX presentation, it follows that we are also in the midst of a WPF Renaissance as, for now, NUI and WPF are closely bound together.

To add sauce to the goose, over the weekend Rob Relyea from the WPF team tweeted the following elliptical comment:

“Yesterday wpf team had champagne/sparkling cider at our all hands meeting. Reached significant milestone.”

As pleased as I was with the Kinect demos at MIX, this piece of messaging took me completely by surprise.  There are still WPF milestones?  The Microsoft Tufaylîs are indeed gifted at entertaining and delighting.

Last Thursday, Microsoft Evangelists Glen Gordon and Joe Healy held an all-day Silverlight firestarter in Atlanta.  It was a great event and will be travelling to Tampa, FL on 2/22 and Miami, FL on 2/24.

The real fun for me was what occurred afterwards.  Glen organized an Ask the Silverlight Experts panel in the backroom of a nearby sports bar.  After the ‘Bob Muglia Imbroglio’ - I wonder if that will ever catch on -  it was refreshing to hear people whose careers are deeply tied to the future of Silverlight actually speak candidly about it.  MVPs are typically cautious creatures, anxious not to speak out of turn, contrary to Microsoft strategy, or in violation of their NDAs with MS.  Following the Bob Muglia story, everyone is additionally anxious to not be the next person to torpedo Silverlight.

The panel was made up of Sergey Barskiy (Data MVP), Shawn Wildermuth (Data MVP, Silverlight Trainer), Jeremy Likness (Silverlight MVP, author of Sterling), Joel Ivory Johnson (WP7 Dev MVP) and Rob Schiefer (co-author of an upcoming WP7 book).  I was there representing the local Silverlight User Group which I run with Corey Schuman.   Jim Wooley (VB MVP) and Steve Porter (CAD MVP) were in the audience.

The first question asked, and the one that dominated the rest of the night, was to the effect of “What’s up with Silverlight and HTML5?”

I had originally planned to give a recap of all the arguments and theories but realized after attempting to do this for about an hour that I mostly just remember my own arguments and have, in my memory, distorted everyone else’s.

Then I came across this beautiful photo by Philip-Lorca diCorcia -- who currently has an exhibit at the David Swirner gallery in New York City if you get a chance to visit – which summarizes everything that was said that night much better than I can.

In case it isn’t clear, the two dudes high-fiving each other on the right are Silverlight 5 and HTML5.

The Emerging Experiences Team at Razorfish has been working with NUI concepts on MS Surface for several years – and more recently on Windows Phone.  When the Kinect sensor became available we quickly grabbed the hardware and started exploring what could be done with it.  The above demo (coded and filmed by Steve Dawson) uses the Kinect and a physics engine to provide an experience that is Sorcerer's Apprentice meets Minority Report.  Enjoy!

[Over the weekend we made it onto Endgadget and Gizmodo.]