Plopped in the Nevada desert like a shiny cathedral of debauchery, Las Vegas is a town that is completely unashamed by its charms. So where better than this in-your-face destination could host an event from a traditionally brash and self-assured software monster? Thankfully, Microsoft agrees, and the ornate Venetian Hotel was chosen again this March to host their third MIX developer’s conference.However, despite using the grandiose ‘Next Web Now’ tagline, the overall vibe we experienced as invited guests was refreshingly humble and honest. It seemed that any perceptions from cynical hacks about Microsoft’s late gatecrashing of the RIA party were all but shared by the company itself – who have been more forced to launch a defence initiative for Windows Vista in recent times. Not much mention of the flawed operating system here though, just a barrage of Silverlight, Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 and a little more Silverlight for those who hadn’t got the message. The four-day agenda kicked off with an opening keynote from Bill Gates’ replacement Ray Ozzie, who now assumes the mantle of chief software architect. He spoke briefly about how on and offline content, community and commerce were overlapping and what key responses Microsoft would pursue. Aside from assurances that existing software products, such as Office, would be evolved, two big themes emerged here in the shape of device connectivity and web monetisation. As a hardware provider in the portable media player, mobile and games console markets, the theory here was that social networking technologies and application sharing would be used to unite this "device cloud" and provide seamless experiences away from the desktop. However, all this fun and innovation would come at a price, and that price would be web advertising. Microsoft clearly see this and sponsored searches as a huge pie that it wants a slice of, and the demonstrations that followed were unabashed about where it fits in.

Ozzie bowed out to make way for vice president of the Developer Division, Scott Guthrie, who introduced a number of customer and client presentations focusing on .NET development and Silverlight 2.0. The latter, which went into beta immediately after the keynote, marks the true arrival of a technology that is starting to persuade high-profile projects to adopt. With a reputed 1.5 million downloads a day, Microsoft clearly has confidence that battling Flash’s ubiquity won’t be a problem, particularly when it comes to handling video. To illustrate, we saw early work on the NBC-partnered project for the upcoming Beijing Olympics, where live high-definition event streams could be watched simultaneously with various screen-in-screen modes. At one stage, the interface showed video clips shown on draggable panels or cards that could be moved and overlaid without any slowdown or noticeable delay. A notable aside here would be the adaptive streaming techniques and the Bit Rate Throttling module of Microsoft’s Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS7). Bit Rate Throttling buffers content just ahead of streaming playback, so that if the video is halted early, a full download is not incurred. A chat later with Wayne Smith, Expression’s group product manager, confirmed that this development could be potentially worthy of as much praise as anything else MIX had up its sleeve.

Back to the commerce side of things, and user experience evangelist Jon Harris showed off simple editing tricks for building templated adverts across Silverlight, Visual Studio and Expression. Publishing options for locked streaming and playback controls were leveraged in an expanding Halo 3 example, built in only a few clicks. Halo then made a second appearance within AOL Mail’s talk on email inbox reskinning and rapid data sorting, before the two show-stopping moments were unveiled. Hard Rock Cafe teamed up with design agency Vertigo to present a Deep Zoom API within Silverlight 2.0 that managed to squeeze two billion pixels of memorabilia photographs onto one web page. The site at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com is frankly awesome and the level of detail achieved by getting so close to such high-resolution imagery is astounding, with next to no loading lag. Before the crowd could draw breath, we learned of an innovative project between Microsoft, London-based agency Splendid and Aston Martin. I was fortunate enough to speak with head of design Marek Reichman at a later press party, but here he explained how prototype systems for the web, the showroom and the cars themselves were being developed with .NET tools. Whether or not the project goes live, we saw some great car customisation functionality using accurate 3D models and some interesting virtual car simulations. Consider this a project we’ll be hoping to do a case study on in forthcoming issues.

Finally, we got a glimpse of undoubtedly Microsoft’s most standards-compliant and CSS-capable version of Internet Explorer yet – at least as long as no codefudging was going on. Pages looked exactly as they would in Firefox and Safari while adhering to CSS 2.1 specifications and boasting official certification. HTML 5 support for proper browser navigation behaviour and connection events was notable, though best of all were the built-in developer tools for debugging and a clever facility for taking ‘web slices’. Sections of live pages can be cut out and attached to the browser bar as rollover tabs that pop-up your selections without leaving the current page. We were told that very lightweight and open markups were used to implement many of the things we saw, so we’ll be bringing a full developer’s guide for IE 8 very soon. Download the beta from www.microsoft.com now and have a play yourself.

The big event keynote was a light-hearted exchange between former Apple evangelist and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. However heavily scripted, this hour-long skit epitomised the uncharacteristic humility of a modern Microsoft. Although extremely confident over the developments MIX had shown already, Ballmer deflected jokes about Vista and the Yahoo! bid with great aplomb. Silverlight 2.0 was at the centre of his excitement for web developments, the monetisation angle was stressed strongly again and the idea that web advertising "is, and will be, the next big thing" was underlined. In all the frivolity, Ballmer jokingly smashed Kawasaki’s MacBook Air before offering a reworking of his famous monkey dance – hollering "web developers!" at the crowd. If you can view the webcast of this session, then it is worth it if only for this. We were mightily encouraged by what we saw, so expect coverage to continue over the coming issues.