Looking back on MIX 08

Last year I was involved in the keynote, so by the time it happened, I had heard it several times already. This year, I could just sit in the audience as a spectator. And wow, what a show!

Highlights from the first keynote for me were:

1. NBC Olympics demo. The whole picture-in-picture thing with live interactive stats was stunning. I'm hoping that Verizon gets FIOS to my house by the time the Olympics start ...

2. Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia app. The Seadragon Deep Zoom technology was amazingly well done. And nobody tops Scott Stanfield for meticulous demo preparation. Well done!

3. Aston Martin. Well, the demo was OK (and the cars are awesome), but Marek Reichman from Aston Martin was awesome. He was totally 'on message' about Aston Martin and the superlatives (and his accent) that he used to describe the car were priceless.

The Ballmer / Kawasaki Show

The second keynote was pure entertainment. Guy Kawasaki and Steve Ballmer put on a show to remember (apparently quite unlike the Zuckerberg / Lacy show at SXSW). There were lots of good-humored barbs traded back and forth and Ballmer gave as good as he got. It really presents Steve in a good light -both as a guy who can take a joke, as well as a guy who really understands the industry and knows how to set the direction for the company.

Highlights for me were:

1. Jab at the MacBook Air "being heavier than my PC" (27:20) and "I'll have a bake-off between my Tosh and that thing backstage" (27:50).

2. Kawasaki's suggestion that Apple is a chihuahua to Windows that Microsoft kicks away (along with Ballmer's imitation of a chihuahua)

3. Steve's revelation that he gets 60 pieces of email a day (with no human filters) and that he responds to them personally (or delegates to someone to follow up).

Of course, there was also a reprise of Monkey Boy that made the headlines as well.

Introducing Dynamic Silverlight

This year, our talk was on Friday morning. I'd much rather get talks over with earlier in a conference since it means that I can relax and enjoy the show but such is life. This year, we had a pretty ambitious agenda planned for our talk, and with the exception of the voices that I could hear from the PC on stage, it went off without a hitch.

Here are some links to the talk that Jimmy and I gave this year. It's available in a bunch of formats:

Silverlight player

iPod formatted MP4 (57.6MB)

WMV for Zune (84.1MB)

The slides are available online, but they're largely content-free. The real meat of the talk is in our demos, and I wrote out those demos as a series of three blog posts:

Part 1: Hello, World! in Dynamic Silverlight

Part 2: Managed JScript and flickr

Part 3: Integrating Silverlight with ASP.NET MVC

You'll need the latest bits that we uploaded just after my talk to run these demos. You can download them from here.

Comments

[johnly38]

This was a really great presentation during mix08, Awesome stuff! But please try to avoid saying "…right…" all the time during your speech. This is annoying after a while. Just my 2 Cent.