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From my perspective, there is no more important product release previewed at MIX09 than Expression Blend 3.

Microsoft Silverlight 3 is shaping up to be a very impressive release. While Silverlight 1.0 was a relatively narrow-purpose release, relevant mostly to streaming content delivery on the web, Silverlight 2.0 delivered a workable general purpose, cross-platform programming environment that leveraged the growing skills of .NET/WPF developers. But Silverlight 2.0 lacked many features and controls that WPF developers depended on, and it violated the WPF subset principle that Microsoft had set for itself to ensure that Silverlight applications could cross-compile with WPF.

 Scott Guthrie put up a few slides at today's MIX09 keynote showing some interesting adoption data for Microsoft Silverlight.

Scott Guthrie delivered part two of this year's MIX09 keynote speech, revealing just how Bill Buxton's arguments for better design processes are affecting the developer tools shipping this year from Microsoft. He revealed a raft of product announcements and upcoming features.

First off, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 ships today.

Today, Scott Guthrie announced in his MIX09 keynote that Microsoft Velocity, a distributed cache solution currently in CTP, would ship as part of Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4. For application developers seeking to add scalability to web applications on a shoestring, this is interesting development.

Bill Buxton kicked off the MIX09 keynote with emphasis on design and the design process. His message: "It's a good time for design!"