MIX '08 - The Next Web Now

Last year at MIX, I decided to sit in the audience and watch Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie deliver the keynote among all the other conference attendees. Even though I knew what we were going to present, it was still fabulous to sit in the audience and watch the electric reaction as we talked about the potential that we opened up with Silverlight, Expression Studio and Visual Studio.

At MIX07, we delivered the first full version of Expression Studio and in November, we launched Visual Studio 2008. The industry’s reaction to these advancements has been phenomenal.

MIX08 started today and the excitement continues to build. Within four months of its release, Silverlight is already powering more than 8,000 applications and organizations are using it to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal.

We have been committing Silverlight support for mobility since day 1 as mobile support is vital to Silverlight’s core value to ‘run everywhere’. Yesterday Nokia announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available on its S60 on Symbian OS and Series 40 as well as all Nokia Internet tablets. Not only will this agreement improve the experience for mobile devices users, it also creates new opportunities for developers and designers by allowing them to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms and computing devices in a consistent and reliable manner.

Just this morning we announced plans to partner with Move Networks, who provide the technology to stream some of the most popular shows on television, to integrate its high-quality video streaming technology into Microsoft Silverlight. This will result in video streaming technology that allows videos to start faster, play smoother (with no buffering), and deliver higher quality video resolution. Within a single environment, designers and developers will be able to seamlessly integrate unique branding and navigational elements within, around and on top of the highest quality online video on the Net.

Additionally, developers can now access the eagerly anticipated Silverlight 2 beta. Highlights of the beta include a WPF-based UI framework that makes building rich Web applications much easier, as well as a rich set of built-in controls that developers and designers can use to quickly build applications and rich networking support. One of my favorite features, ‘Deep Zoom,’ was showcased by Hard Rock during the keynote. The smooth in-place zooming and panning that Deep Zoom allows is a true advancement and raises the bar on what image viewing can be. Through this feature, it's now possible to make high resolution images easily consumable on the Internet.

To deliver on the promise of integrating designers more seamlessly into the development process, we also released Expression Studio 2 beta which I blogged about earlier today.

I am very pleased to see all of the progress we are making on our mission to offer a common and complete application platform and tools offering that ranges from the standards based Web, to rich interactive applications, to the desktop and devices.

Namaste!