MIX08 for Non-Attendees

At last, the mad rush is over. The run-up to a conference like MIX is always frantic: for me, the first three weeks in February involved a constant juggle of competing priorities. With the exception of one last-minute firedrill, the worst was over by late Friday afternoon. Now it's the calm before the storm; it's too late to fix bugs, to rewrite labs, to rearrange the schedule! Instead, it's a perfect time to write a few blog entries.

I'm looking forward to meeting a number of you at the event (do stop me and say hi if you see me!), but I know that the vast majority of folk reading this aren't able to join us in Las Vegas for various reasons. It's therefore my goal over the next few days to relay as many of the highlights as schedule permits. So what's worth looking out for over the next few days?

• Firstly, if you haven't seen Scott Guthrie's blog over the last week, you should check out his two most recent posts on Silverlight 2. I never understood how Scott managed to write such in-depth blogs at the same time as running half of DevDiv, but I've finally discovered his hidden secret and it's time for me to reveal it to the world. Scott actually has an identical twin brother named alterScott and the two of them work shifts. alterScott works the night shift - when Scott goes to bed, alterScott is burning the midnight oil constructing lengthy tutorials on Silverlight 2 and Expression Blend. You'll never see alterScott in public - he's painfully shy and is also very pale since he never sees the daylight. But I snuck into building 42 early one morning and managed to take a quick photo of him before security forcibly removed me. Anyway, just on the off-chance that we decided to release a build of Silverlight 2 this week, you could do a lot worse than to work through alterScott's tutorials if you want to quickly get up to speed.
• Secondly, the real Scott will be sharing Wednesday's MIX keynote with Ray Ozzie and Dean Hachamovitch (GM for Internet Explorer). If you're into web development at all, that keynote is going to be required viewing - we've got lots of new announcements, some great demos, and one or two surprises. You can watch the keynote live at 9:30am Pacific / 5:30pm GMT by clicking on one of the following three streams: 750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps.
• Thirdly, if any of the breakout sessions or panels take your fancy, you'll be able to view them online within 24 hours of each session, here: MIX08 sessions. It's very hard to recommend specific sessions because everyone has their own area of interest, so I'm not even going to try!
• Finally, my team put the finishing touches late last week to a great set of hands-on labs that are a great way to learn Silverlight. We'll be posting those up first thing on Wednesday as the keynote starts, and I'll of course share a link to them at that time.

Whether you're in Las Vegas or not, you won't miss out on the MIX experience. We're dedicated to bringing as much of it as we can to you wherever you are. Here's looking forward to a fun week!