We rolled in to the sin city in the early afternoon.  It wasn’t the hot afternoon we were expecting but after leaving in sub sub zero temperatures it was a welcome relief. This was the third Mix that Microsoft has held. This years event was held at the Venitian think big casino with huge convention space. The location was great although like most conferences I think they underestimate the popularity of some of the sessions and put them in small rooms. 

There was some expectation of a new release or announcement, which turned out to be IE8 and silverlight 2.0. These may have only been new versions they did show a lot of refinement, it is sometimes better to have improvements vs new tools.  Microsoft did a great job of keeping people fed and energized for the long days of sessions, as the days went on there was alot more redbull being consumed. (note: 2 redbulls back to back is one to many)  The sessions times were jammed with interesting sessions aimed at business, creative and developers streams with lots of overlap sessions. Most of the sessions were very well done and I applaud the presenters.  I have also come to the conclusion that panels are boring as hell unless the moderator is great.

It is very interesting to see the evolution of the entire tool mix that Microsoft is putting forward.  They are putting forward very compelling reasons to choose their approach and technologies.  Beyond the initial learning curve the tool set allows for rapid applications deployment. Microsoft has this tendency to enter into markets late and 3 versions later you would swear they invented the category. I had concern over the adoption for the silverlight plugin. This seems to be under control 1.5 million daily downloads. I see this growing was those wanting to watch the olympics online will need to have this installed when the stuff for the olympics is in the wild. What a great deployment strategy! People are going to be watching online, there is more coverage online, the feeds are impressive quality …. they are going to want the silverlight plugin.

I was impressed by the stuff that Microsoft has going on. This isn’t the company that it was 5 years ago. They have lots of smart people working on incredible stuff. There is more sense of community responsibility and are working very hard to be open, illustrated by a number of announcements regarding code release as open source. I wasn’t really expecting that much innovation by such a large company to be honest.  

So the question of the day is .. would we switch ConceptShare to Silverlight?  Today no, V3 who knows. Would we try Silverlight for some of the other ideas that we want to roll out? … there is a good chance. We had a lot of questions answered about what can be done. I think it comes down to wether or not we have the time to spend learning Silverlight and become experts in it. We will be talking to some of the great developers we met and learn more from their experiences. We were very impressed by the leaps forward that Silverlight and all of the showcased technologies have shown.  Keep pushing the limits! 

Big thanks to the Microsoft crew and all the support they are showing. the Microsoft Canada guys have been extremely helpful in helping us understand what is different about Microsoft now vs the Microsoft of old.  It is refreshing to see such a dedicated group supporting the innovation that is occurring north of the border.  Keep up the great job guys ! So to all the people that we met from all over the world thanks for making my time in the Sin city a great experience. We left there with our heads spinning with the new stuff that is possible. We have left there with lots of inspiration. 

Cheers Â
Scott  �

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