MIX essentials 2008 Roundup

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IMG_1376Last week on April 24th we had our first MIX essentials event in Belgium. It was a full day with a dynamic opening keynote; developer and designer break-out sessions and of course a fantastic closing keynote and Q&A session with Steve Ballmer.

Opening keynote

The opening keynote was a mix of presentations, demos and some cool videos (if I say so myself :-)). Luc van de Velde was the conductor doing the intro of the developer/designer collaboration story and orchestrating all demos and other presenters. clip_image001
The first demo was done by 4 guys from 4 of Belgium's top web agencies, each of them with a defined role in the collaboration story: Jan from Nascom, Stijn from These Days, Thomas from LBi and Chris from Emakina. Check it out here.

Next we had Martin Tirion, UX Evangelist coming over from the Netherlands to present us the newest around IE8, Silverlight 2 and Expression Suite 2. I did a few demos during his part as well.

To close off the keynote, Catherine Heller, Technical Evangelist came over from Redmond for an overview of the Windows Live platform. She also invited someone from Truvo on stage to give a demo on their Live Agent to search for phone numbers of people and businesses. If you want to add the bot to your messenger account just add a friend and choose obi.fr@truvo.be for French or obi.nl@truvo.be for Dutch.

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Recordings of all sessions

All sessions are now (yes now!) available on our MSDN Chopsticks platform, keynote videos are available without login, for the breakout sessions simply login using a Live ID account as this is premium content. The PowerPoint presentations are also available for download with each video.

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Designer sessions were delivered by David Pugh-Jones, Ian Griffiths and Paul Dawson. Developer sessions were delivered by Tim Heuer, Catherine Heller and Gill Cleeren.

Pictures of the event

Lots of pictures have been posted on Flickr (thanks Miel and Gill).

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What's next?

Hopefully next year we will be hosting a second edition of MIX essentials and we'll see you there. In the meantime, subscribe to our newsletter Express Yourself, keep track of the news on our Twitter account https://twitter.com/mixessentialsbe/ and Light up the web!

Here are some resources mentioned during the event to get you started on Silverlight and Microsoft Expression.

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