MIX08 – Great Conference

My ambition to blog everyday during the conference was met by the reality of not having as much time as I had imagined.

After 2.5 days of great sessions and conversations I have to say that the conference was one of the best I have attended. The sessions were really well done with the exception for the last one I attended. The MS presenters were all consistently good – the best 2 being Scott Hanselman (ASP.NET MVC) and Karen Korby (Silverlight 2.0 Controls.)

I feel that not only did I learn a lot but more importantly I have walked away re-energized and focused. I had a feeling that Silverlight 2.0was going to be awesome but after working with the beta bits I realized that it is a game changer. The ability to create RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) in a familiar and productive environment is just awesome.

I have started to re-design my company website (which is in dire need of an update – a case of  “the shoemakers children are often shoeless”) as a way to get my feet wet with the SDK. I have worked with WPF and WCF over the last year but now that it can be leveraged in the a cross-platform/cross-browser way it is a viable option for the work that I do.

I will post more detailed impressions of Silverlight 2.0 Beta once I get a working version of the new site up and running.

MIX08 Begins Tomorrow

Just arrived in Vegas for this year’s MIX conference. The big thing at this conference is Silverlight 2.0. A greatly enhanced Silverlight platform will bring a trimmed down version of the .NET CLR to the browser. Allowing you to write RIA apps hosted in the browser in your .NET language of choice.

Silverlight Version 1.0 your only choice for langauge was Javascript – and for me if I can avoid Javascript I will do it anytime that I can. It is not that Javascript is a bad language – but C# is much better – at least for me. 

Looking forward to the conference – it my first conference since going out on my own 9 years ago. I hope to get energized and inspired by getting away and being able to focus on some new technology – sort of like a mini-sebatical.

I will try and blog each day with the highlights from the sessions and conversations.

I had two .NET celebrity sightings – first was checking into the hotel – Miguel de Icaza- of the mono project - who I saw present a few years ago at a user group meeting in Waltham MA. The scecond was during the Wintellect scavenger hunt. One of the things we needed to find a Silverlight illuminary and we ran into Scott Hanselman of the famed Hanselminutes podcast. He was gracious and let us take a picture with him – he obviously just arrived and all he wanted to do was check-in – thanks Scott.