MIX 10: A Brief Overview

For the first time, I attended MIX 10 live in Las Vegas.  The last couple years, I was forced to attend the event from the comfort of my office chair via streaming video.  While this approach works, it lacks the interactive quality of being able to actually converse with the speakers and other attendees.  Most of what I actually learned from the event, came from these interactions.

You can find all the videos from the event here.  I believe each keynote and every session is now available for streaming.  I am currently going through them and watching the ones that I am interested in but couldn’t attend.

The first keynote was interesting.  The primary focus was Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 Series.  The main reason for me being there was together  information on the upcoming release (version 4) of Silverlight so that portion of the keynote was definitely interesting.  I also have to admit that I liked what I saw regarding the phone.  It seems appealing but I am primarily excited about being able to develop apps for it using Silverlight.

The second keynote was not quite as interesting.  I did enjoy Bill Buxton’s talk about NUI(Natural User Interface) but I wasn’t overlly joyed or moved by the unveiling of Internet Explorer 9.  I believe the only thing of interest, to me, regarding IE 9 was the announcement that they are pushing and working hard to ensure that the same HTML and code works in IE 9 just as it does in the other browsers.  Basically, they are actually embracing the standards (especially HTML 5) and even going so far as to work with W3C.

I only wanted this first post to be a brief overview so I am going to stop here.  I have written many notes regarding the sessions that I attended and I am working on conducting additional research and compiling all the notes so I can write several related articles.  I am also working on configuring one of my computers with all the RC and beta products I need.  I do want to make a quick note that if you want to do phone development, you need Vista or Windows 7 (XP is not supported).