MIX07 off to a great start

I've been quiet again for a while, mostly because my team has been heads-down for a few weeks working on a demo for ScottGu's MIX keynote, and today it went off without a hitch. 

Silverlight is an absolutely amazing platform, and I'm not just saying that because it's coming out of MS.  The whole story - from designer tools, to developer tools, to platform - is just fantastic and has a great feel to it.  It's one of those times when you've got the right pieces floating around (.NET, WPF, the Expression Suite) and you tie them together into something that's bigger than the sum of it's parts.  Mac support, FireFox support, cross platform debugging, light auto-install, it's all there. 

My team has been working on the Airline Demo that Scott showed today and it went off beautifully.  I'd like to give some props to Bret Victor, who's fantastic Magic Ink whitepaper was the inspration for the app.  Being backstage for the keynotes at one of these big shows is quite an experience.  You could launch a space shuttle from back there.  I've been to many, many big developer shows but never really realized now much orchastration there is.  Anyway, basically we demo'd an experience where you can easily plan an airline trip with three mouse clicks - instead of the maze of drop downs and radio buttons most airline websites currently present to users.  It got the point across very well.

Anyway, if you got a chance to see it either here in Vegas or online, I hope you liked what you saw.  As a guy who worked on Windows Forms for 8 years, I'm definitely excited to be working with a client-based programming model again (don't get me wrong, ASP.NET is great, stateless is just hard sometimes).  As a guy who's been doing Javascript for the last year, I'm DEFINTELY excited to be back into a compiled language with a full-toolset!