Microsoft MIXing It Up
RDN Senior Editor Kathleen Richards is out in Las Vegas, attending the
Microsoft MIX08 conference. The confab, now in its third year, focuses on Web
development and design, and has emerged as a launching pad for key Microsoft
products like Silverlight, the Microsoft Expression suite and Internet Explorer
8.
As Kathleen reports,
MIX08 has produced a flurry of important developer-related releases, including
the first public downloads of beta versions of Silverlight 2 and Internet Explorer
8. There's also a preview of Visual Studio tooling for Silverlight 2, an Expression
Blend 2 beta and an ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) preview.
In his keynote address to the more than 2,500 attendees, Microsoft Chief Software
Architect Ray Ozzie offered his view of how the Web is shaping Microsoft's vision
and what developers might expect going forward. He described the Web as a hub
for devices, social experiences and applications with linking, tagging and ranking
becoming as common as file and edit in toolbars.
The IE 8 beta, released at the show, seems to offer an early glimpse of this
vision. In addition to welcome interoperability tools and dev-oriented features,
IE 8 includes an Activities menu that lets users highlight text on a page and
then choose an activity -- for example, an address and Live Maps, or the word
"camera" and eBay. The Web Slices feature lets users subscribe to
parts of a Web page.
Also of note at the conference are some eye-catching demos of Silverlight 2
applications, including a preview of NBC.com's Olympics site and Hard Rock's
"Memorabilia" project.
Did you attend the MIX08 conference? What are your impressions of Microsoft's
latest wares? E-mail me at [email protected].
Posted by Michael Desmond on 03/06/2008