[MIX08] pre-conference day

Today march 4 was the MIX08 VIP pre conference "Together@MIX". We had sessions and panels on the morning and an afternoon full of fun activities (I chose the Las Vegas Extreme rides!).

Here is the speakers and a bit of what they said:

Steve Guttman (PM for Expression Web)

• Expression branding
• Expression Web 2
  • PHP support (intellisense & syntax highlight, cassini for web server)
  • Photoshop layers support
  • ActiveX for Flash
  • AJAX
• Expression Encoder 2 "a real post-production tool"
  • lots of new features
  • XAML and video overlays
  • Edit player in Blend
• More at the keynote "I've been in Microsoft for years and the number of announcements at the keynote tomorrow is un-be-lie-vable !!"

Doug Olson

• Designer/Developer workflow
• Expression Studio 2 for April (focus on Silverlight)
• Expression Blend 2 (for Silverlight 1)
• Expression Design (XAML slice like Dreamweaver)

George Moore (GM Live Platform)

• Live Messenger API
• Silverlight Streaming
• Audience Analytics

Brad Abrams (ASP.NET Team)

• Silverlight ASP.NET control
• Silverlight Localization
• Silverlight 2 UI controls
• MVC sample app

Tim Sneath

• WPF
  • "WPF is the Ferrari, Silverlight is the Mini Cooper..."
  • Service Pack in september
  • Light .NET client install

Daniel Makoski (Interactive Design Manager for Surface)

• Microsoft Surface User Experience Team, or Microsoft Surface UX or Microsoft SUX...
• Very funny video on Surface "Big Ass Table" !

We had some keynote leaks today, but... let's wait for tomorrow !

The afternoon was busy trying every roller coaster of Las Vegas !!!!