I had a bunch of stuff to do at the same time today – a variety of watching, listening, tweeting, responding, and editing for a recap event tomorrow. Sometimes 3 monitors is just not enough…

There seemed to be so much awesome stuff to talk about. Here’s my attempt at a recap on stuff:

• SuperPreview – built into Expression Web 3 this enables a web developer to take a look at their site rendering on a bunch of different browsers, and uses the cloud to render with those browsers that aren’t installed. That means you can test IE6, IE7 and IE8 side by side without the need for a VM or similar. A beta of the standalone tool can be downloaded here. You’ve got to love the name of this. I’m hoping that v2 is called SuperSuperPreview. Nice use of the cloud too!
• ASP.NET MVC – it’s been a long time coming but the v1.0 has also been released. That’s great news for web developers looking to follow the trend of rapid development via MVC-style frameworks such as Rails, Django, Monorail and the various techniques those styles have introduced (or reintroduced) such as friendly URLs. You can download this here. You can see a great example of an MVC site at stackoverflow.com
• IIS – a bunch of new extensions for IIS7 are being released, including a new FTP extension that supports FTPS amongst others.
• Web Platform Installer – with all of this new stuff, then WPI may be a great aid to navigate the possibilities. This installer will keep you up-to-date with the platform, components and tools to get motoring as fast as possible. It’ll even set you up with PHP if you ask it nicely.
• Azure – there’s some new stuff for Azure including PHP support via FastCGI (your PHP app in the cloud!), full trust .NET apps and changes to SQL Server Data Services that @DeepFat mentioned previously (making it relational).
• Silverlight – of course it’s Silverlight that a lot of people want to hear about:
• There were so many features to talk about:
• Media capabilities such as h.264 support, and smooth streaming. In particular the instant scrub and PVR functionality.
• RIA capabilities: GPU acceleration, pixel shaders and effects, 100 controls, DeepZoom enhancements, 3D transformations, ClearType, SEO/Deeplinking stuff, Multitouch support (for Windows 7)
• Offline: Oh yeah, SL3 now works out of the browser on PC and Mac with features such as AutoUpdate, zero-hassle install (in fact it was so fast that The Gu had to point out we’d seen it…)
• Blend:
• Jon Harris ran an awesome demo of Blend 3 and brought to life the SketchFlow capabilities of Blend 3 which allow rapid prototyping of an application and then accelerate the development of the real application.
• Import of Photoshop and Illustrator files.
• TFS integration and Intellisense
• There’s actually a whole bunch of cool features in Blend such as dummy data helpers, drag and drop binding and so on.
• Eclipse support for Silverlight – so you can develop on your Mac.
• Some real scenarios:
• Netflix love it!
• NBC gave some stats on the Olympics coverage and now plan to use Silverlight to deliver 720p PVR style coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.
• Those stats are mind boggling: 1.3 billion page views, 52.1 unique visitors, 75.5 million videos watched, 9.9 million hours of video consumed, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 5,000 unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 35 million mobile views, 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered.
• The World Wide Telescope can be viewed in Silverlight (meaning it’ll work on your Mac…)
• A Playboy magazine archive with DeepZoom by the smart guys at Vertigo
• You can download Silverlight 3 beta here and get the full juice on the features.
• And then finally, it turns out that with all of these extra features, the SL3 install is 40K smaller than SL2. Even Chuck Norris would have baulked at that, but not The Gu.

So, not bad for Day 1. I’ve only skimmed the surface, but the links should provide all the starting points you need. Roll on Day 2.