Wow, I made it back from a hot and dry Las Vegas trip. I have been trying to catch up on much needed sleep, unpacking and digesting all the cool information that I absorbed while there.

This was a first for me. The first large scale conference that I have been to, and it really didn't disappoint. Tons of information, major announcements from Microsoft, and some pretty big name speakers all contributed to a great conference.

Many things make these conferences great, the panels or sessions, the speakers themselves, the atmosphere, the city (Vegas baby!) but what is probably the best is seeing other people in your field and being able to interact with them. Putting yourself on a peer level with some of the best in the industry is a bit humbling at times, but also ignites that fire to be just that little bit better.

The Big News

Although not even a release candidate Silverlight stole the show. Almost twenty sessions dealt directly with the development and deployment of the already titled Flash killer from Microsoft. The beta that was available starting day one of the conference is designed as a cross platform rich media interface that can bring together video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.

The raw video processing power of this software/plug-in is absolutely amazing. Applications already being developed by Major League Baseball, Netflix, and CBS news. The demos they provided at the conference were some stunning Windows Vista like experiences that are put onto the Web using a roughly 50K chunk of code called XAML and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

One of the most interesting things dealing with Silverlight specifically was in an attempt to show cross-platform comparability they loaded each of the demos on the Mac platform as well. Maybe this is a little admission from Redmond that Apple is a substantial competitor?

User generated content is pushing forward. The CBS news demo provided an area for the general public to submit rate and get their own video clips on the local news casts.

Panels & Sessions

There were somewhere in the area of 130 session at MIX07 dealing with everything from design to hardcore programming. You were only able to attend about 12 sessions by following the schedule, however the MIX crew has put all the sessions video's online. The sessions were about an hour and a half long typically lead by one and sometimes two presenters.

The opening keynote was great! Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie gave great presentations and introduced Silverlight to he audience in an easy to understand manner and provided numerous awesome applications that are in development from companies like Netflix, CBS News, and Major League Baseball. The keynote was also the platform to make announcements of several different beta products available for public downloads at that moment.

Among my favorite breakout sessions was the one titled "Design Rich Client Experiences with Expression Blend and WPF" in which Celso Gomes & Christian Shormann discuss how to create vector graphics and animate them using Expression Blend. They also discuss some basic data binding principles that Blend uses as well.

Although I didn't have any sessions or panels that I didn't like, some of the Silverlight presentations that dealt with the hardcore coding of the product went a little quickly for me to keep up, however they make up for that by publishing all the audio, and video of the sessions at the Sessions Center to review at your own pace. I will be doing this for quite a while to see everything that I missed.

Eyes & Ears of the Conference

Technology was utilized at MIX07 quite nicely. One of the most prominent shows of this was the software running on all the desktop machines there that has been nicknamed "Flitter". Flitter is a mashup app that pulled in relevant tags from Flickr, and Twitter and displayed what was happening right now at the conference.

Although I am not a fan of Twitter, the creators of Flitter came up with a great concept to use this tool and publish updates to the entire conference through the use of a screen saver that was broadcast to all the computers on Electronic Avenue, as well as the two outermost screens at the keynote sessions.

The tool grabbed the Feed for all friends of the user MIX07 and displayed the recent tweets as they are called from the friends of MIX07 all over a pretty cool MIX branded background. The posts were displayed in semi-transparent windows accompanied by the users profile photo if there was one, and he user name of the poster, then shrunk back into the background.

The same was true of all Flickr photos tagged with MIX07. The screen saver would also grab those and display them in the same type of fashion. It was very well done!

If you are interested in seeing the screen saver, you can download and install it here. It provides the source as well, so if you are interested in seeing how it was done, or want to add in your own feeds and use it for your own machine you could do that easily using the config file provided.

Late Nights

Obviously there was plenty to do in the evenings when the sessions let out. Vegas obviously provides plenty of shows and casinos to blow your money, however MIX provided something almost every night that you could interact with fellow friends and colleagues.

A couple of application development sessions they called mashup events were held the first couple of nights everyone could congregate and develop applications that they were already working on, or collaborate with others to start on new applications. These nights were fueled by catered Pizza, Wine and Spirits, and desserts. The second night there was a prize for the best app created on these nights.

The evening event at the PURE nightclub at Ceaser's Palace was the big event in terms of nightlife. The PURE is typically a $30 cover nightclub that hosts parties for some of the biggest Hollywood Celebes. The no cover party here kicked off at 6:00 PM with an open bar and tons of food, and went up until 10:00 PM when they started letting in the public. Everyone was allowed to stay without cover past 10:00 and onto 6:00 AM if you wanted to party that far into the AM. Then an hour later get up to make it to he sessions right?

Notes for Next Years Attendees

Being as this was our first year there are a number of things I might have done differently looking back on it. Here's a couple of tips for the noobs to MIX08.

• Stay at the conference Hotel

  There were a number of things that only the folks staying at the Venetian knew about. One of the things I was asking people about on Twitter was a room that many were talking about hanging out in. A twitter response I received said only to follow the signs. This would have only been an ok response if we were staying in the Venetian, however we were instead staying at Treasure Island.

• Check Out the Information Center

  Use this service as much as possible. One of the things that bothered us as we attended the conference was the fact that many of the events didn't give all the details of what was happening. Typically it gave the hours of the event and what the event was about, but failed to give the details of if food and drink were provided. For many of the events this was never written on the documentation handed out at the start of the conference or even on the Web site.

• Microsoft Promotion Central

  Be prepared for a deluge of Microsoft marketing material. Although there were non Microsoft speakers pretty much everything centered around Microsoft products. This is fine, but there are more things Web then Microsoft.

Final Reflections

• Microsoft continues to impress me when it comes to their Web technology effort over the last year or so. Although they were slow out of the gate and IE continues to be a sore thumb, Microsoft is creating some great software that allows designers and developers to collaborate far more effectively than that of Adobe/Macromedia.
• Silverlight is going to revolutionize the Web. It is already deemed the Flash killer and based on the power of it I believe it. It is going to take a year or two to really take hold just as Flash did due to having to download a plug-in to make it work, but as more beautiful interactive applications become available using Silverlight people will come around.
• With the ease that developers and designers can collaborate on the same set of project files will revolutionize the development process. This may again take a while to get going as Microsoft kicks that Web unfriendly tag off it's back, but I believe that the benefits here are to great to ignore.
• Silverlight allows back end development in almost any language. This is huge!
• Although I don't see the point of letting everyone know what your doing at every point in your everyday life, Twitter does have a great place at conferences to let friends and colleagues where you are and what your doing. I was even forced to open up the Twitter account to get some information from fellow conference attendees. I do have to admit it worked well. And now the account will go dormant until the next conference I attend.
• Some great give aways including Windows Vista Ultimate, and a commemorative edition of the Expression Studio suite were a great draw to the conference. The two products retail value is more then the conference itself cost.
• And finally... a little bit of Vegas goes a long ways

Next Year is MIX08

Although I don't know the status of making it to this event again to this next year, it might depend a lot on the location however I would be up for it if the opportunity presented itself.

The hope is more to head to SXSW. I have wanted to get to this conference for about 3 - 4 years now and hopefully next year will be the year.