It has been a busy week this week. I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday and have been really enjoying meeting with colleagues from around the world and customers and partners who made the decision to join the event.

As a Microsoft employee, you sometimes think you know all that is going on, but I have to say that I was still very impressed by the sheer number of announcements that we tried to squeeze in to a single keynote this week. Wednesday's keynote was kicked off by Ray Ozzie, and, though not my high point of the kickoff, it is certainly interesting to hear what he is thinking as I find him somewhat of an enigma.

The keynote covered a number of pieces of the Silverlight story, as well as work with partners and updates to the Expression products.

Silverlight 2 beta 1: This update to the Silverlight runtime is fully compatible with all the v1 sites out there, but now includes the .NET support that was promised a year ago and a limited GoLive license. The reaction from people at the conference was genuinely positive with, as expected, Microsoft developers being the most happy. I did have a random chat with a designer from an agency in the U.S. and he expressed being interested in learning SL now that he'd seen the show cases. To build Silverlight 2 beta content you'll want to download the beta of Expression Blend 2.5 (yeah, the version numbers are out of sync, hard to solve that one).

Expression v2 betas: Expression v2 products are getting close and we released beta versions of the products. Blend v2 supports Silverlight v1, Expression Web v2 supports PHP and many other nice features. Check out Expression Encoder v2 which added simple editing, better encoding, new UI. All the features are listed on the Expression Encoder blog. I really like this product and find I use it quite a bit.

The partner products shown were really nice. IMHO the best was a fairly simple site for the NBC production of the Olympics. The challenge they took on was to make all the broadcasts and all content available both synchronously and asynchronously so the volume of video content they'll support is huge! They choose Silverlight for the player side since they felt the infrastructure for Windows Media was more suitable and scaled better than Flash video infrastructure and serving. Also discussed was Double Click allowing Silverlight content and their upcoming release of a SDK to support in-stream advertising on their networks. Move Networks also added Silverlight support, and partners such as AOL and Aston Martin showed off applications using Silverlight.

Silverlight for mobile was big too. Nokia's announcement of support for Silverlight mobile came out earlier in the week. Nice to see the support of a company of Nokia's stature as we bring this out as they wouldn't do this unless they thought it had some value to their users.

And, lastly, but first in the keynote, is IE8 beta. I wasn't too fond of the presentation itself, but the content was great. IE7 has been so bad with standards and so slow to update that this was a huge relief. CSS2.1 support, new features (with code released under and open source license), test suites, in browser debugging. Check out the IE Blog for details. One point noted by pundit Joe Wilcox was that there were over 500 comments on the initial announcement blog post that were positive. A good start.

Lots of other things I enjoyed during the week. I'll start updating my blog a bit more when I get back and have time to sort through my notes.