MIX 07 Thoughts...

Just got back from MIX 07.  It was my first big conference so I don't have anything to compare it to, but I had a blast!  I met and heard from some very smart people, saw some incredible demos and of course enjoyed a little Vegas night life ;-)

Silverlight
The biggest announcements and demos were all around Silverlight.  The idea of being able to run C# code in any major browser on both PC's and Macs is a .Net developers dream.  Strongly typed languages with full IDE debugging capabilities!

CLR on the Mac is a huge step forward, and the ability to debug Silverlight applications running in Safari is absolutely astonishing.  In my observations of rich internet application development, cross browser QA and debugging is so resource intensive that having a common IDE to do it all is simply invaluable.

One thing I noted based off the Q&A sessions is that some classic web developers may have a littler harder time adapting to a total client side browser application.  For desktop application developers who are already creating hybrid apps (think FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox and Desktop... or more broadly NewsGator Client Applications) with their own embedded browsers and Web Service powered features, the idea is pretty straight forward... except now we can be in the browser.  There were more then a few questions to clarify where certain code was running and the answer was always the same - on the client.

And even though Silverlight 1.1 is only an alpha (1.0 which is in beta does not have .Net integration), the demos and the coding sessions prove to me that it's already more powerful then anything else I've used.

Expression Studio
I haven't installed my copy of Expression Studio yet (we also got Vista Ultimate so my weekend project is to rebuild my tablet with Vista and all the other goodies) but I was impressed with the demos and sessions that revolved around it.  Separating design from implementation, but keeping solutions and hierarchies the same just makes sense.  And for a person who's done a lot of work with source control and continuous integration, it makes even more sense. 

WPF and LINQ
Unfortunately I only made it to one WPF session, but it sparked a few ideas that I'm looking forward to exploring.  LINQ is another feature that I can't wait to play with.  XLINQ sounds fantastic, though I wonder what type of performance hit you take by using it.  I'll have to look around for any data about XPath versus XLINQ efficiency.

Other Notes
I was very impressed with the presenters and attendees.  Getting to sit in on a panel Q&A session where Tom Conrad (CTO of Pandora) was in the crowd and asking David Watson (VP of Product Design and Development for Digital Media at Disney/ABC) about balancing advertisement driven content and bandwidth cost was intriguing. 

I also had the opportunity (thanks to being there with Greg) to meet Don Dodge whose blog is one of my must reads everyday.  If you've never read Don's blog, I highly recommend it.  He usually posts at least once a day and each post is well worth reading.  Listening to him explain how he gets his ideas of what to write and how he writes was fascinating. 

All in all is was an incredible experience.   So many ideas of how to use all these new innovations...  I can't wait to start playing with it all!