Post-MIX Thoughts

I had a hunch I’d be too tired to write up a day-by-day recap of my first MIX conference which turned out to be exactly right. You’ve probably heard by now all the stuff that was announced, so I’ll try to keep this an opinion piece instead of a news article.

The Good

Prior to attending I had read that the most valuable part of conferences like MIX was not the presentations, but the people. This was absolutely and completely true. There’s no substitute for having conversations with brilliant people and there were a ton of brilliant people at the conference. I had good conversations with Phil Haack, Jeff Atwood and the Stack Overflow devs Jarrod and Geoff, Joel Spolsky (possibly the highlight of my career), Rob Conery, Jon Galloway, Scott Hanselman, Dave Ward from Encosia, Justin Etheredge, some guys from Woot and many more. Learning the how and why of how they do things is educational and inspiring.

Thankfully, Microsoft has realized the importance of these types of interactions and does a great job of facilitating them. They set up a room called “3rd Place” with couches, snacks, free wifi and power strips. It was a great setup and worth the price of admission alone. If you’re at MIX next year and none of the sessions at any given time really inspire you, go hang out at 3rd Place and strike up conversations instead. You can always watch the session video later.

One conversation I’m particularly enthused about is the meeting I had with Rob Conery of SubSonic fame. SubSonic has gone a little stale and needs some freshening up. We discussed some issues getting in the way of progress and some ideas for going forward. I’m going to try to get it kick started again, which I will blog about when that happens. I love SubSonic and am excited to start contributing to it’s future.

I also showed off Managed Assembly when I had a chance and got some good feedback on the site both design-wise and vision-wise. Now that it’s up and running, we’ll see how it goes for a little bit before I make any significant changes.

MIX also does a good job of keeping a good balance of content for designers and developers. I think all devs should have some basic understanding of good design principles and MIX does a good job of exposing that without overdoing it for devs. Bill Buxton and Deborah Adler (she designed the new Target prescription packaging) gave insightful keynotes that had some good design insights for both designers and developers.

The Not-As-Good

One reason 3rd Place was more appealing to me than the sessions is a matter of timing. ASP.NET MVC went final, but there was very little new content that wasn’t already covered at PDC or in blog posts since. Rob Conery’s session stood out because it was the only one that had more stuff in it that I hadn’t seen than stuff that I had seen. It was great. The video has been posted so you should watch it. Almost everything else that was new was tied to Silverlight. Which brings me to…

The ‘meh’

Silverlight 3. Meh. It’s nice. It does cool stuff. It now works out of the browser, which has huge potential. Adobe AIR now has some serious competition for building Twitter clients (ba-dum-dum). I did learn some things about Silverlight I didn’t know (like support for threading), but overall, I just don’t care that much about it yet.

The Bad

IE8. OK, IE8 isn’t so bad, but until IE6 is dead, it’s completely irrelevant. Slices? Yawn. Accelerators? Yawn. I don’t want to write browser-specific code anymore. The IE intro video was pretty funny though.

Was it worth the trip?

Absolutely. If you’re a MS web dev or a designer that works with them, you should be at MIX. You’ll learn a lot from other people and the sessions. You’ll have a chance to talk directly to the people who build the tools that are the basis for your profession and give them feedback and ideas from the real world. You’ll have fun because it’s in Vegas. Try to make it next year. You won’t regret it.