by Don Burnett
Well Mix 08 is upon us... There are a number of things that I expect to be announced that Microsoft employees have already blogged about and let the cat out of the bag about so to speak... I figured it would be fun to collapse all of those announcements here (those that are public right now anyway), so for those not going because it's sold out, and for those that are going to know what the cool things we already know about that we can examine more in-depth.
Internet Explorer 8
Over at Josh Allen's Mix Blog, we learn that Dean Hachamovitch will be keynoting the event and introducing us to Internet Explorer 8.0. Sounds like from reading the IE blog also this one has a super-standards rendering mode that kicks!
Expression Studio
A new version which supports all current released products. You don't have to be a mind reader on this one, because Microsoft has been sending out Expression Blend 2 preview releases for sometime now. After reading Scott Guthrie's blog, I am sure we can expect one to support Silverlight 2.0 as well. If there is a new version expect an "IMMEDIATE" review from me of it all.
PHP Support
Besides IIS 7 support FASTCGI, the web server now supports PHP and it looks like corporately Microsoft is going to support PHP corporately in addition to asp.net as an alternative development environment. It's nice to see Microsoft embracing open standards like PHP officially now, for both authoring and delivery.
Silverlight 2
The big announcements are already at Scott Guthrie's blog blog, but it sounds like we can expect a fully featured 2.0 this time (not the under developed 1.1), with things like data binding and an SDK full of controls including things like a datagrid. It's kind of exciting to see this but it sounds maybe more feature filled that WPF, so there may be something WPF has to actually catch up with some of the features that are present with Silverlight. Microsoft is a big support of the 3rd party controls market for Visual Studio, so I expect they left a few out on WPF expecting the third parties to fill that gap. It's nice to see they might not be taking that approach with Silverlight.
In case you haven't seen what any of this stuff looks like the following images have been posted to other folks blogs:
From Shawn Burke's MSDN Blog (Visual Studio 2008, support Silverlight):
And the Silverlight 2.0 Controls Toolbox from the Danny Douglass Blog (note all the cool new content controls):
The real reason to come to Mix 08: Community
These are all cool reasons to come to Vegas this year, but it's not the only reason. In the past year we have had a lot of exciting things happen. We have seen the entire Mix community grow from infancy to a serious marketplace. It's really exciting to see where this has came in a year.. I have made many new friends along the way.. I will be blogging and hopefully giving you a "ground level" view of what's going on this year at the conference and hopefully some interviews with folks making a difference in the community.. Each year I have been so far has given me insight, access to a lot of new ideas and great new technology that brings folks together.
If anyone wants to get with me, during Mix I love meeting people for coffee, food, oxygen (SMILE)... you can email me don@donburnett.com and I'll send you my cellular phone # so you can TEXT me to get in touch with me during the conference. I love meeting folks, networking and having fun..
1 comment:
I would love to see something more new stuff, like wpf/silverlight for windows mobile. It's been very quiet ...
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