What a great month this is, MIX08, SXSW, FOWA, so many great things going on, it's awesome!  I just got finished watching the MIX08 keynote with Scott Guthrie and a number of other folks who did demos and contributed various things to the keynote.  First off, I have to say I am missing not being there.  Honestly MIX is a very cool conference, and being there was a ton of fun last year!  With that said as I was streaming the keynote I was taking some notes on some of the things that were talked about which mainly focused on two things.  Those two things were Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight.  Just as last year Silverlight seemed to dominate the keynote, but even more then last year I am pumped to see what they are doing with this technology and it's integration with more devices.  Here are a few of the key things that are new with Silverlight.

Silverlight

• There are more then 1.5 million installations of Silverlight being served each day.
  
• Silverlight 2 beta 1 available today
• Silverlight 2 supports bitrate detection to raise and lower quality of video streams during times when bandwidth isn't as readily available.  For example if you were watching an episode of The Office in HD and suddenly your available bandwidth was cut in half, Silverlight would seamlessly degrade the video to a proper bitrate and bring it back to HD when the bandwidth again became available.  This feature doesn't require any additional code.
• Silverlight 2 supports what is called Progressive Stream Bursting.  What this means is that when you start downloading a progressive stream like on YouTube, you usually get a burst at the beginning where it loads a lot of the movie content quickly, then it continues to load after that.  With Silverlight you can give that burst, then only maintain say a 10 second window ahead of the current play position and so save bandwidth from users who don't view the whole video, or open then close right away etc.
• The 2008 Beijing Olympics will be streamed all 17 days via Silverlight in high quality video.  Among other features the video application will support picture in picture as well as viewing an event from 4 separate angles at one time via the interface.
  
• AOL's next generation mail client will use Silverlight for a more desktop like interface.  The interface shown during the demo wasn't much different then the one they currently have online, however it was lightning fast!
• Silverlight 2 will be available for mobile devices.  Microsoft has partnered with Nokia to bring Silverlight to their smart phones, and obviously it will be supported by Windows Mobile.  No word on the IPhone, although I have to think support would come for that.

So Silverlight is positioning itself more and more to take Flash head on and kick it to the curb, but probably the announcement that is more interesting to those of you that read this blog is that of Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8

First off, I need to give Microsoft some quick props for their recent reversal of their standards compliance in IE8 that I talked about a couple weeks back.  In a really surprising change of heart the IE team decided to support standards as best they can and instead of having to opt out of rendering basically in backwards compatibility mode, you will now have to opt in, which is a much better way of implementing it.  So long story short, they reversed their decision to make IE8 behave like IE7 unless specifically requested.

Alright, back to the MIX08 keynote!  As of the end of the keynote... well even before actually, IE8 Beta 1 is available for download.  So this is very cool cause it gives developers the time to test what they already have out there against the IE8 rendering engine to verify what sites are going to need that version targeting meta string.  Even more then that IE8 is bringing on board some great new features that I am pretty excited about.  Here are the notes I jotted down about IE8:

• IE8 supports the HTML 5 spec meaning that it will support Network connection events.  This is significant for online applications as they can detect when Internet connectivity is lost and take action to prevent data loss, such as temporarily storing changes until the connection is restored.
• IE8 will support the back button in terms of the AJAX click trail.  So if you use Google maps, and zoom in a few times, then drag to a new area and so on, those events will be in the history and so the user can use the back button and get the expected behavior.  Great Feature!
• IE8 comes pre-installed with developer debugging tool.  Very primitive compared to things like Firefox's Firebug, but a great step in the right direction.
• IE8 comes with something new that for lack of a better term I am calling selectable services.  What this means is when you select a chunk of data with the cursor, then right click it and get some contextual things you might do with that data.  See the image below...

• Finally, and probably the coolest feature of IE8 is the ability to subscribe to parts of Web page.  This is called a "Web Slices".  Subscribing to a slice is basically like a feed but it keeps the visual part of the pages as well, and is like cropping out a certain area of the site you want to see.  These are stored in the toolbar much like the quick links in the browser and clicking them opens just that little portion of the site for you to keep up to date.  These are created using certain pieces of markup and unfortunately I don't have that right now, nor the screen shot of this.  I will work on that.

Those are the things that I jotted down, although there are tons of other cool things that were said.  Keep an eye out here for the keynotes to be posted soon here if you would like to watch them.  I would recommend it, there is some really cool stuff in there.

Better wrap it up, I will see you again from SXSW in Austin, TX!