Pre-MIX Thoughts

Vacation ends tomorrow and I’m on my way to Vegas for my first MIX conference. I’m extremely excited to be going and can’t wait to meet tons of people and see what Microsoft has in store for us .NET web developers. I haven’t had a chance to read too much pre-conference speculation from blogs and such (my feed reading has been a little behind due to the aforementioned vacation), so I don’t know what all to expect, besides a lot more on Silverlight than I’d probably prefer.

There is one way Silverlight 3 can grab my attention though: proper offline support. We do a lot of work with digital signage and have been using Adobe AIR due to its excellent offline support. Unfortunately that means we run a dual stack in some situations with .NET powering the server-side and AIR/Flash running the client. I’d love to standardize on one stack and the only way we can do that is with Silverlight running offline on Macs. So offline Silverlight support is on my wish list.

I’m also hoping Microsoft lays out their plans for ASP.NET MVC. I really like MVC and find Webforms almost unbearable now. I can’t wait to see where they’ll take it next and I hope they lay it all out at MIX. And I hope its more than just controls. I’m hoping to find out what improvements will be made in VS2010 for MVC.

I’m not looking forward to any IE announcements, unless they announce IE9 is going to integrate Webkit. This will *never* happen of course, but I’m just sayin’ that’s how they could make me care about IE again.

I’m excited for Azure too, but I don’t have any specific needs in this area yet but may so in the future so I’m going to pay a lot of attention to it. If nothing else, I just hope they give attendees some beta tokens so I can try it out.

The biggest thing I’m hoping for is something to be announced that I would have never seen coming. I like surprises, especially surprise product or service launches.

I’m going to try to blog my reaction to what I experience each day, assuming I’m not too tired from being in Vegas with a bunch of other geeks. You can also follow my Twitter stream to get live updates.

Also, check back tomorrow night for a big announcement about the side project I’ve been hinting at for awhile. There will be info on the blog here and on this site.