MIX 09 just start with a excellent keynote by Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie. Scott had a lot of exciting announcements and I have seen a lot of presentations by Scott but never seen a funny introductory video like this. Don’t miss it. The entire keynote is available on-demand at Visitmix or you see Scott’s introductory video at channel9. Some of the announcement by Scott include,
Super preview – A new feature added to the next version of Expression Web (Expression Web 3) which allows us to test how the webpage is rendered in different browsers. This includes all third party browsers as well as different versions of IE. Now we need not do to different machines or VMs to test in different versions IE. Currently there is support for IE 6, 7 & 8. Besides being bundled with expression web, Super Preview is available as a standalone download.
Web Platform Installer – Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta is released which adds support for installation of today’s releases. This adds support for installing Web Applications from Microsoft Web App Gallery.
ASP.NET MVC – ASP.Net MVC 1.0 is finally released after being in beta for quite long time. VS 2010 adds a lot of support to ASP.Net MVC development.
ASP.NET 4 – ASP.NET 4.0 which will be released with Visual Studio 2010 has a lot of features and some of them include Code focused improvements, Distributed Caching (Code name - Velocity) , better Javascript/ AJAX / Jquery support. CTP of Visual Studio 2010 is was released in PDC during October 2008 as a Virtual PC and to here are some of the tips to download (http://tinyurl.com/GETCTP) .
Azure - Azure, the new cloud computing platform from Microsoft which was released in the PDC during October 2008 will be updated with lot of changes. These updates are driven by the Community feedback.
Bizspark – Bizspark, a initiative by Microsoft that encourages new entrepreneurs by providing all licensed Microsoft Software for free for first 3 years.
Silverlight 3.0 - Silverlight 3.0 beta was released today with lot of promising improvements in the media streaming, GPU acceleration, Deepzoom and a the list goes on. Netflix, one of the early adopters of Silverlight shared their Silverlight experiences and the mile stones achieved.
Scott just gave a introduction about these new releases and there plenty of sessions which focus deeply on these technologies. It was mentioned that the videos of the sessions will be published for On demand viewing in 24 hours. Stay Tuned!