Thoughts post Remix UK 2008

The Remix UK 2008 conference was held in Brighton on the 18th and 19th of September and I was lucky enough to attend.
It was described on the web site as " A 48 hr conversation all about the ‘Next Web’, what it means today and the potential impact of technologies, tools and techniques for the future. Inspiring designers and developers to take the media they love to new levels of user experience."
The 1st day started off with a keynote from Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research and Scott Guthrie who is a Corporate Vice President in the Developer Division at Microsoft. His team is responsible for Asp.Net, Silverlight and many other technologies.

Bill started off with a presentation on how "He loves Apple, the Iphone, the IPod, the Wii and Google".
He explained that he loves them because they have made design integral to their business. He wants design to be integral to Microsoft's business as well.
Scott Guthrie presented on "Great User Experiences via the Web, Media, Rich Internet Applications and Mobile".
Highlights here included.
-Silverlight has 1.5m downloads a day.
- The ITV.Com did a demo of their Silverlight Football Wall. (https://www.itv.com/Sport/Football/VideoWall/default.html)
I also attended sessions on Silverlight, Asp.Net MVC and Ado.Net Data Services.

I did attend Sara Ford's presentation on Visual Studio Tips and Tricks and it was as interesting as I had hoped.

Sara blogged about her experiences here.

I was at her 20\20 talk and it did go down very well. The entire 20\20 talk (1 slide or demo every 20 seconds) was a very good idea and came across very well.

I also really enjoyed the "Ready Steady Speak" sessions ran by the Next Gen User Group. This was a chance for people who hadn't presented at a conference like this to get up and do 5 minutes on a topic of their choice.

I came away impressed by our Design and Developer message for the Web and was glad to see so many external developers excited by and programming with Microsoft Tools for the Web.