Zoom-in Online

Here are Mix09, for some reason they thought it was a good idea to set up a stage and invite attendees to play Rock Band in public. Right outside the press work room, where I spend most of my time here. And, they turn it up loud!

All of us in the press work room have agreed, no civilian should be legally allowed to sing anything by Alice in Chains, Queen, or the Chili Peppers in public. Surely the Obama administration can do something about this.

At Mix I had the opportunity to test out the Microsoft Arc Mouse:

It's a geniunely nice product - comfortable, solid feeling (it feels weighty for its size) and clever (folds up nicely and has a magnetic dock for its USB dongle).

As you can see below, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt here at Mix09 that reads, "I'm Not Slacking Off. My Code's Compiling":

Clearly this guy is not using PowerShell or the DLR!

One of the most talked-about developments at the Microsoft Mix09 conference has been SketchFlow.

Microsoft's really stepping up in terms of media support.  Scott Guthrie ran through the highlights and showed some great demos, on both the client (Silverlight) and server (IIS) side.
Silverlight 3:

• GPU Hardware Acceleration
• New Codec Support - H.264, AAC, MPEG-4
• Raw bitstream API for A/V (in C#)
• Improved logging for media analytics

IIS Media Services (available as a free download):

Scott Guthrie reviewed Silverlight's numbers:

• 150MM installations of Silverlight
• 300,m000 Developers & designers
• 200+ Partners in 30 countries
• 200+ Microsoft products & websites

Quite impressive uptake in a very short time.

Demo of StackOverflow.com as a showcase of a site built on the Microsoft platform.

Key stats:

600k daily pageviews
200k unique visitors daily

All run on a couple small commodity boxes and built in about 6 mos. Nice!

* Extra credit - people often ask them if it's built in RoR which they take as a great compliment

Bill Buxton, at today's Microsoft Mix09 keynote, made an excellent point regarding design; namely, that as software people we often spend way too much design time focused on the layout and visual aspects of design -- what buttons are where, the set of input fields on a screen, etc -- and not nearly enough on the transitions between states.

The big demo during the Web section was around SuperPreview within Expression Web.
Key things SuperPreview does, brings up the page in a multi-browser comparison view, allowing you to see the same page in various browsers (Safari, Firefox, IE, etc) not only side by side, but in "onion skin" overlay mode, allowing you to see any differences between browsers.

Scott Guthrie announced:

Roadmap for ASP.NET 4:
* Web Forms improvements
* ASP.NET MVC upgrade
* AJAX, Distributed Caching (Velocity)

Also, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 now shipping

Scott Guthrie announced formally during the Mix09 keynote that Velocity will be shipping with ASP.NET 4.0.

Big news for the distributed cache market!

Oops. Bill Buxton's "shortest demo ever" didn't work.

It certainly builds the drama for when Scott does the same demo a bit later in the keynote. Stay tuned.

Bill Buxton, of Microsoft Research and author of "Sketching User Experience", opened with theme of "It's A Good Time For Design!". He's making the case that during this economy, design is not only still relevant, but even more important than ever.

Next week (Wed-Fri) I will be out in Las Vegas at Mix09 and just like last year, Lab49 has partnered with Zoom-In to provide news, audio and pictures live from Mix.
We've got an awesome lineup of interviews planned so watch this space.