Before a week for looking forward, let’s take a quick peek back for context.

Bill Gates at MIX06

MIX06: “The Next Web Now.”

3 years ago, Microsoft launched this hip series of conferences, inviting a cross-platform audience of business decision makers, developers and designers (…wait… designers?!).

The inaugural keynote explored the opportunities that would emerge as the internet “evolves… and ‘web’ and ‘application’ concepts merge.”

It was the only MIX keynote to star Bill Gates as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, and featured a fireside chat between Bill and Tim O’Reilly, and Bill’s mea culpa about the state of IE6.

It was a simpler time back then. My Mom wasn’t even on Facebook yet.

MIX07: “A 72-Hour Conversation”

Ray Ozzie and ScottGu at MIX07

The conference’s sophomore year was billed as a “72-hour conversation” at a time when the rampant success of social networking was all the buzz.

Ray Ozzie took the helm, WPF/E got its new look and name, and so we saw .NET boldly go cross-browser, cross-platform – at least, in CTP form.

MIX08

Loosely, the following year’s theme was (loosely) connected things: their impact on the individual, their impact on the organization.  “Small pieces, loosely joined” was I believe how Ray put it.

And there were Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight 2.0, the highly anticipated enabler, went Beta.  Designers (I thought) were finally somewhat understood, even if their Microsoft toolset was still fermenting.

SteveB and GuyK at MIX08

There was an explicit expectation set by Ray, Steve and Company that MIX08 represented but one of several steps on the road to something big at the PDC coming in the autumn.

PDC2008

Then, months later, Silverlight 2.0 was unleashed on the wild, with 3.0 already on the radar. But wait… were we even talking about the presentation layer any more, or, with Silverlight’s eventual impact firmly impressed upon us, had we moved on to discuss awesome sky-plumbing instead?

We’re talkin’ Azure, Live Services too numerous to mention, data and enterprise service buses and meshes in the sky, a bookstore that got there first, Models and Domain-Specific Languages (see Don Box’s characterization of this dreadfully wond’rous craic), and so much more, all available streamed online now for your viewing pleasure.

MIX09

So we begin MIX09 with feet tentatively on the presentation layer, but eyes on this intriguing Cloud on the horizon.

The MIX09 Session List alone would suggest an emphasis (by session number) on:

• Silverlight (31) and UI/UX (16),
• Azure (11) and Live Services (8),
  and
• ASP.NET (14)

I mentioned previously that I visit MIX for the buzz.  This week I’m there again to meet, to chat, and to think — and especially, to ask what awesome things should we do with all this  stuff? What could I do for my clients? For their organizations? For my own projects?

Even if you’re not able to attend, the keynote will be streamed live, and you’ll have a chance to ask ScottGu some questions online 30 minutes after it’s over.

We’re three years into this MIX journey to The Next Web.  This week, we expect to gain insight into Microsoft’s perspective on the road ahead.  I’m going to try to write here daily, and figure out how to use this Twitter thing as well.  Inspired by keynote speaker Bill Buxton, I may even try my hand at a little sketching, and change up my technology choices as an audience member for the keynote and sessions. (hint: I’m thinking of leaving the laptop behind).

Right – that’s enough context – I’m off to Vegas to Mix things up a little!

Sure I could watch the keynote from home, but MIX for me is about the buzz and the people – and I’m looking forward to a mix of both in March.

What do you expect will be the most interesting thing announced/demoed/discussed this year?

Some photos from MIXes past:

I can has swag?

Do you think she's still painting the Trevi?

What would these guys have to say today about the process of building 'communities of purpose'?

Wouldn't you love to see these two revisit this interview?

What will be his legacy?

2. More Microsoft Research innovation sees the light of day in the product groups and for developers at large. Deep Zoom becomes available to developers through Silverlight and demoed by the Hard Rock Cafe, and Surface makes an eye-catching if early-days appearance in the Mix Sandbox.

3. The designer message gets taken seriously by attendees, perhaps motivated by the increasing maturity of nascent designer tools like Expression Blend. Although this year’s keynote term “dev-igner” chafes me, unlike in previous years, the MIX08 crowd spoke with their feet, packing dev-design crossover talks like The Human Brain Relationship and Nerd + Art.

Is Guy ever not on form? He did a great job asking Steve the tough questions, making it fun, and getting a few candid answers, along with some “PR” answers as well, including Steve’s cautious response to “What about Adobe?”, which wasn’t asked until they opened up the floor to questions.

Bruce sums up the details on what they discussed here and here.

There was some interesting discussion about Yahoo, Google, Apple of course (including some ribbing about Guy’s Macbook Air) and other players in the industry.

I put a few photos up on my MIX08 set at Flickr.

In an update to WPF that should be available some time this summer, we’re going to get SHADER SUPPORT in WPF.

Yes, that kind of shader.

It was demoed during the keynote with some custom shaders being applied to WPF content (including UI elements) presented in 3D.

WPF team, I love you guys.

(image credit: LearnWPF Blog)

- Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available!
- Expression Blend 2.5 (!) March Preview is available!
- [update] Silverlight Beta tools for Visual Studio 2008 are available
- formal announcement of Silverlight Mobile device support!

In my presentation last weekend I was asked about Silverlight adoption stats, which I predicted we’d get during the keynote. We did, with:

- a montage of apps already built with Silverlight
- the stat of 1.5+ mllion installations of Silverlight runtime / day

Now, you can ignore the rest of my notes if you want, and go check out the Silverlight 2.0-powered Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia demo: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ It incorporates the “Big, Wide and Deep” Microsoft Research technology I wrote about a year ago. GREAT application of that technology.

…or, read on…

Silverlight and Media

3 key points here:

1. Improving experience: Adaptive Streaming – “please choose your connection speed” not only fails the Mom test but even for an “expert” you don’t know if you will receive consistent bandwidth over a shared or patchy connection. So the streaming service can now adjust the bitrate automatically even without user input. No code.
- Evidence: Move Networks – strategic partnership with Microsoft (Disney etc)

2. TCO: Streaming and progressive download experiences using Windows Media Services 2008, which is free to run on any Windows Server 2008 box. The quality of the service is a big reason why the Olympics will be hosted using Silverlight. For the case where users stop 1/2 way through a video, set up bitrate throttles for video, so that after a burst, you are only paying for x seconds of unwatched video.

3. Business Opportunities: Great demo of advertising intergration into a page using Silverlight, Blend 2.5 March Preview, Video.Show integration, XAML used to present dynamic ad content on top of video. Ari Paparo from DoubleClick showing advertising integration opportunities in order to monetise web properties.

Olympics Evidence for Silverlight Media: Perkins Miller, Sr VP Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics. 2200 hours of live coverage, which will then be made available as video on-demand (VOD). How to deliver in a way that is interactive? Today they delivered an engaging demo where you can do instant replays, overlay expert commentary, send and share links while watching, have a UI to see what’s going on across many feeds, set up picture-in-picture, watch 4 LIVE feeds at once, and have community interaction (see top videos etc.).

Silverlight and RIA
- Multi-Language support
- WPF UI Framework subset – layout management, data binding, styling, animation
- Robust networking stack (REST, SOAP, WS-*, standard HTTP endpoints, cross-domain networking, sockets)
- Integrated Data Support (incl. built-in support for LINQ, local cache)
- Small download, fast install: 4.3MB download, 6-10 seconds to install on clean machine
- Control templating and skinning model from WPF comes to Silverlight – including visual tree and animations!

- shipping the controls as source!!
- shipping a testing framework that allows you to write unit tests!
- shipping over 2000 unit tests that cover the Silverlight controls!

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and WPF 3.5 evidence

AOL - mail client – power of Control Templates, basically. meh.

Hard Rock and Vertigo - 70,000 pieces of rock memorabilia
***** Demo – first GREAT demo of the morning
2 billion pixels
oh my goodness: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Aston Martin – online, dealership and ownership experiences
- online – Silverlight experience
- dealership – WPF and XNA experience
- ownership – “true telemetry” proof-of-concept demo
p.s. I can please has an Aston Martin? for demo purposes?

Cirque du Soleil - WPF Line-of-business app demo – Head of Casting, Resident Shows America, Krista Monson
***** Demo – second GREAT demo of the morning!!
They managed to make a WPF line-of-business app demo really engaging and relevant. Wow.

[Quick update: you can download the IE8 Beta here.]

I know that this conference is fundamentally about connected systems, and the web browser is a vitally important component.

But I thought this was a profoundly boring way to begin the technical announcement part of the keynote.

At first I was like “meh,” but then there were a couple of great demos that redeemed this segment, which I’ll mention after listing Dean’s 8 new things about IE8:

1. CSS 2.1
– of all the w3c working groups, this one should have the most impact

2. CSS Cetification
– 702 test cases made available under BSD license to w3c
- by default, IE8 interprets content in the most standards-compliant way

3. Perf
– much improved, esp. JScript related to strings

4. HTML 5 Start

5. Dev Tools
- set breakpoints in IE using “Developer Tools” . You can add a watch, there’s an immediate window, CSS style tracing and more.

6. Activities (integrate site into rest of web)
- “Smart-tag” like activities when you select, e.g., an address, a product that we can find on ebay, etc., without having to leave the page (using a hover-over window)
- very easy to extend

7. WebSlices (deliver user-specific content)
- allows me to subscribe and interact to portions of a page that interest me.
- examples: an ebay auction, the Facebook status
- dev experience: just add a div to the page, no need for a separate feed

8. Beta1 for Devs available after the keynote
- Get IE8 Beta here

My initial thought on this part of the keynote: IE8 does NOT make for an interesting demo. Why is this where we are starting our day?!

But then the things that engaged me:
- Showing IE8 responding to “Network Connection Lost” — and support for DOM storage
- Dev Tools built in to IE8 for setting breakpoints in code, adding watches, immediate window, CSS style tracing, and more.

Already available: First look at IE8 Activities and WebSlices

So in summary

Ray Ozzie began by saying he sees Mix08 as one of several milestones on a path culminating at the PDC event in October. The evolution he sees happening around the web are organized around 3 core principles:

1. (impact to the individual:) Think of web as hub (social)
- linking, sharing, ranking, tagging will become as familiar as file, edit, view

2. (impact to the enterprise:) Power of choice as enterprise moves to embrace the cloud
- enteprrise based software, partner-hosted services, and services in the cloud
- distributed, federated services between enterprise data center and the cloud

3. “Small pieces, loosely joined”

Connected Devices
– “Personal Device Mesh”
- unified device management where devices can report in for management, health, location
- an app plat cognisent of all your devices
- software+service offering

Connected Entertainment
– license your media once, and enjoy the media anywhere you want

Connected Productivity
– Office, Office Mobile, Office Live
- Office Live Workspace – wide public beta yesterday

Connected Business
– “inevitable shift toward utility computing in the Enterprise”
- Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, Office Commnications Server, SQL Server Data Services

Connected Development
– .NET offerings

More to come over a couple of posts.

The timing is ideal, because, well, let me join the phalanx of bloggers who are reporting that the Mix08 conference is taking place next week in Las Vegas. I’m excited to be attending Mix again this year, after previously enjoying Mix07 and Mix06.

Amid the excitement and curiosity about what’s coming at Mix are constrant reminders of the applicability of the WPF skillset to Silverlight 2 web development. (See, for example, Jesse Liberty’s suggestion for what eager would-be Silverlight 2 developers should do by way of training while waiting for the beta bits.)

If you’re attending Mix, grab thirteen23′s Mix08 Conference Agenda builder, an elegant WPF app that reminds you of just how many intriguing presentations you won’t be able to attend because they conflict with another equally intriguing presentation.

Thank goodness for webcasts and the 1.4x-speed playback option in Windows Media Player.