Mix 07 Recap - What a week
Mix 07 was probably the most exciting experience I have ever had at a conference. The big rollout of Silverlight and seeing how to actually use it was just simply amazing. I was sort of half asleep and half awake thinking about how I could use Silverlight on just about everything I have done in my career.
There has been a lot of reaction and opinions of what Silverlight means, but not a whole lot on how to develop Silverlight. I hope over the next few days I can get into this and share some things with you.
The last session I attended was one on how to develop your ASP.NET sites to be indexed properly by the search engines. This may actually have been the best session as far as immediate impact on production sites because Search Engine Optimization is so important. I was able to really pick the brains of the engineers from Live.com on what is important, what is bad, what to avoid and what to include. They talked about many aspects of getting indexed and covered the Site Map protocol and offered some actual .NET code to manage building a compliant Site Map file, which was just too awsome. They also covered ways to get Silverlight pages indexed, which was a huge concern to me going through the week. With that answered, yes Silverlight will be the optimal way to develop rich web sites that will be popular.
The whole 72 hours experience was very surreal in many ways. I really did not do any Vegas stuff, seeing the lights and some of the sights for the first time was great. I got to see the Belagio fountains do their dance, the volcano erupt at the Mirage, the Gondolas at the Venetian and slot machines everywhere. But when it was all said and done, they were just not entertaining compared to what was going on in the conference. I made some great new friends, met up with some old friends and just plain learned so much more than the $1000 for the conference fee.
Finally, for my friend Aaron, here is a picture of the Kool Aid dispenser!
