Having a good time in Vegas - a keynote to remember

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Hardrock.com

First, you just have to check this out.  Seadragon technology comes to Silverlight in the form of Deep Zoom on Hardrock's memorabilia site.  In the keynote they were able to zoom down to the scratch marks on the guitar.

Then watch the keynote here.  I will let the video stream speak for itself.  Some really amazing technology and customer stories.

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Things that caught my eye....

    • ASP.NET MVC
    • IE8
      • Html 5 support - a back button that works in AJAX!
      • Connection awareness - no more timeouts on a blog page)
      • Script debugging built right in like Visual Studio
      • CSS Styling
      • Activities (inline maps and comments was very cool)
      • Webslices (watching ebay and facebook I will definitely be using)
      • Download it now, here.
    • Silverlight is averaging 1.5 million installations a day. Version 2.0 beta is available now for download here.
      • Controls, controls, controls!  All released to public domain with source as well.
        • Skinning controls (AOL E-mail demo shows this off great)
      • Adaptive streaming - adapts to bitrate of video based on network bandwidth and cpu
      • Move Networks partnership (people who do Lost and Grey's Anatomy on NBC site)
      • Media Services 2008 free and runs on top of Win Server 2008.  Can throttle easily in IIS.
        • Bit Rate throttle, turn off and on. Stay 10 secs in front of user - no more wasted bandwidth.
      • Advertising Templates! Very easy to embed an add now in Silverlight using Visual Studio
        • Good use of storyboards via blend for ad animation.
        • Video.Show site - Lots of best practices. Free off codeplex here.
        • Ad Manager to track usage
        • IIS can set playlists and turn off/on ad skipping for users
        • Encoder 2 visual marker demo very cool
          • Can use bitmaps, alpha encoded videos and xaml now then encode down to video
        • Doubleclick SDK!  Fires off events inside Silverlight Video and you just add the handlers.
      • NBC.com
        • Amazing demo.  2,200 hours of Video On Demand.
        • Encoder bookmark usage - jump to specific part of stream based on expert commentary
      • Silverlight Webparts for Sharepoint
      • WPF performance via Service pack this summer.
        • Amazing shader model effects using gpu - can apply to images, videos and any control.
      • Silverlight on Mobile
        • Great demo - Mixer App
        • Interesting announcement - Silvelright on a non windows mobile device via Nokia's Symbian OS.  Platform choice even on Mobile devices? You bet!
      • Very funny Guthrie skit I won't give away but involves juggling and the circus. =)

Tim Sneath is running an excellent live blog of the keynote here as well.

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