MIX09 Day 1

Wow. Quite a day. I’m not going to try to summarize all the information that came out, as there have been many posts on it already this one from Alvin Ashcraft does a nice job of summarizing the announcements succinctly).

But I did want to share my impression, which is that I saw some amazingly cool stuff. I think what most impressed me about the Silverlight 3 announcements was the fact that despite adding a ton of new features (perspective 3D, pixel shaders, additional codecs, deep linking, navigation, and SEO support, etc.), the Silverlight 3 download weighs in at 40k smaller than Silverlight 2, thanks to optimizations performed on both new code and the existing codebase. That’s pretty much the polar opposite of bloat, and it’s great news.

I was also really blown away by the SketchFlow tools that will be in Expression Blend 3, for rapidly prototyping applications, including really nice workflow.

This being MIX, there were also some great opportunities for fun, including Rock Band. Naturally, I had to continue my Billy Idol run, this time performing “White Wedding” with a group that included Jeff Atwood on drums. You can see a couple of video clips here (end of the post) and here. We also formed the DE Street Band (yours truly on vocals, Brian Hitney on bass, Lindsay Rutter on guitar and Glen Gordon on drums) for a performance of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” Video here. Thanks to Frank La Vigne for capturing the band’s debut.

I’ll leave you with my favorite MIX09 session title (photo by Frank):

Ninjas, FTW!