Wednesday, March 18, 2009

MIX09 Day 1 Recap

Day one at MIX09 is almost in the bag- "just" the open bar TAO Party to go- and in its wake is a flurry of new information (some of which wasn't even presented at MIX). So while you could spend the next several hours trying to comb the interwebs to get a complete picture, I, your humble .NET commentator, will try to bring you the highlights and save you some time. MIX09 Day 1 Highlights & Announcements

  • Expression Web 3 (no release links)
    • New "SuperPreview" tool - compare a page rendering in multiple browsers (including IE6,7,8 and browsers that run on other OSs via "cloud services")
    • Stand-alone SuperPreview tool for IE testing only
  • Expression Blend 3
    • Preview available today (required for SL3 work)
    • New SketchFlow tools (for rapid prototyping)
    • Stand-alone SketchFlow Viewer (for easy prototype sharing and annotation feedback)
    • Native support for importing (and editing) Photoshop/Illustrator illustrations
    • XAML, C#, VB IntelliSense
    • Support for Behaviors and live-data at design-time
  • Silverlight 3
    • Beta 1 available today
    • TONS of news - too much for a quick recap, but some highlights:
      • RIA Services, Fit Client ("out of browser") support, Offline APIs, GPU acceleration, H.264 support, multi-touch support, deep linking framework, ClearType support (not in beta- but coming), and much more
    • Plugin size smaller than SL2 (despite all new stuff)
  • Azure
    • CTP updated
    • Full Trust .NET support, support for PHP/FastCGI, Support for relational data storage (via SQL Data Services), support for Geo-Location services
    • Commercial release on track for later this year
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • ASP.NET AJAX 4 Preview 4
  • Misc Microsoft Announcements

There you go! Day one in re-cap. Clearly there are a ton more details not listed here, but hopefully this is enough to get you started. If I missed something major, let me know and I’ll update the post with more details. Stay tuned for Day Two coverage.

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