For those of you that did not get a chance to attend the MIX09 conference, or watch any of the live streams I wanted to provide you with a summary of all the announcements made yesterday morning.

 

Bill Buxton announced the theme for MIX this year is “Return on Experience,” and that is precisely what he focused on during the opening minutes of keynote.

 

Scott Guthrie
“The Gu” came on stage after a funny video which featured him dancing, getting his hair fixed and passion for red polo shirt. Major announcements in web space include:

  • The preview of Expression Blend 3 is available for download today!
  • SuperPreview is a new tool that is part of Expression Web 3 that will allow web developers to comprehensively test their web pages for cross-browser compatibility.
  • The ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework shipped as of today.
  • A series of improvements for ASP.NET 4.0, including:
    • Enhanced web form development
    • Integration of ASP.NET MVC and AJAX
    • Distributed caching
  • Enhancements to Visual Studio 2010 for web developers, including:
    • New and enhanced tools for JavaScript, AJAX and JQuery development
    • SharePoint developers become first class citizens in the IDE with new development tools for MOSS
    • New publishing and deployment tools, including the ability to keep multiple web.config files specific to a deployment environment, i.e. development, test, staging and production
  • Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2 beta provides you with the ability to get all the tools and technologies for developing web applications for the ASP.NET platform in one place.
  • Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 available today.
  • Customer-driven enhancements to the Windows Azure Service Platform, including FastCGI, PHP and .NET full trust, SQL Data Services will become a true relational database in the cloud and commitment to ship Windows Azure in 2009!

 

Silverlight 3.0 highlights:

  • Silverlight 3 will provide cross-platform support for hardware acceleration.
  • Silverlight 3 will include the H.264, AAC and MPEG-4 codecs - it will also include a raw bit-stream AV API which will allow developers to create custom codecs in managed code.
  • Silverlight 3 includes enhanced logging capabilities for managing app analytics (monetization and SEO)
  • IIS Media Services, as a free add-on, will enable any IIS7 web server to provide smooth AV streaming (key features includes advanced logging, bit-rate throttling and edge caching)
  • Few of the slides for Silverlight 3 listed the following feature enhancements:
    • GPU acceleration and hardware compositing
    • Perspective 3D, essentially moving 2D objects in the UI in a 3D space
    • An API for bitmap images and pixels
    • Shader effects
    • Hardware acceleration for Deep Zoom
    • “Deep linking,” which is the ability for a user to link to a specific place inside a Silverlight application
    • Navigation and search engine optimization
    • Clear Type Fonts
    • Assemblies/Library caching support
    • More than 100+ controls available
  • Silverlight 3 will ship with the native ability to run outside the browser. This means a big challenge to Adobe AIRsJ
  • Olympics in Vancouver (2010) will be streamed live using Silverlight platform.
  • The Silverlight 3 installer package is SMALLER (40K) than the previous version.

 

Netflix Case Study - Kevin McEntee, VP, Web Engineering shared the stage with ScottGu

  • Netflix acknowledged moving away from own (proprietary) player to Silverlight. (Great platform for having great video players!!)
  • Silverlight‘s Adaptive Media streaming works!! (including Mac - Safari and Firefox)
  • Cross Platform is “a reality” using Silverlight!!  (Cross Browser, Cross Platform and On-Devices such as Xbox)
  • Installers are Evils  but Silverlight offers sweet experience!!
  • Silverlight’s DRM abilities for content protection is great!!

 

Hope this helps in case you have limited time to watch many hours of streaming to mine golden nuggets :=))

 

Best Regards,
Rajan Dwivedi
Premier Services, Microsoft