My take on MIX09 – Day 1

I’m out here at our MIX ‘09 conference in Las Vegas this week. The web is awash with articles about the announcements such as this one. https://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/mix09-silverlight-3-is-amazing-in-and-out-of-the-browser.ars. For me personally, the announcements at yesterday’s keynote were stunning, from two perspectives.

First, the technology and tools just blew me away. It’s great to see not only awesome new features in the Silverlight runtime like media enhancements, perspective 3d and the ability to run outside the browser, but also significant advances in the tools. The demos of Expression Blend 3 show that the product teams really understand the workflow (and necessary hacks) designers go through when producing comps, simulating interaction, presenting them to customers and gathering feedback. When you watch the keynote demo, look for the demos of SketchFlow and you’ll see what I mean. They’re doing for designers what Visual Studio did for developers.

The second perspective that floored me was the stunning demos from customers and partners who are using these tools and technologies to deliver amazing experiences with very little effort. Note especially the Netflix demo, where they said they initially explored using Silverlight only to provide streaming movies to the Mac but ultimately realized it would be the best runtime for their video player on all platforms.

I’m about to head into the day 2 keynote, can’t wait to be wowed again.

Here is a link to the major videos, including yesterday’s keynote. https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mix/videoGallery.aspx My developer readers will certainly watch this. But my designer readers, do yourself a favor and check out how easy your job will get once Expression Blend hits the streets!. ;)