Last year I had the opportunity to attend the MIX conference and I absolutely loved the event.  Brilliant minds from all over the web were walking the halls, the energy level was high, and I think we surprised a lot of people in a great way.  This weekend I'm packing my luggage full of gadgets, building some cool apps on my MacBook Pro, and just itching to see what people are talking about and creating at Microsoft's MIX'08 Conference 3/5-3/7 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. There were legends in the crowd last year, from all over the web and world, and the discussions were awesome.  Don MacAskill and Jeff Barr in a web services panel; the legendary Scott Guthrie wooing the audience with pure coder awesomeness; MySpace and Facebook threw some parties that just paled in comparison to the Silverlight party at PURE... but that was oh so last year! Since that conference, the rich client has just continued to evolve and it is obvious that there's a lot of goodness in taking the web experience to the next level.  Every day I'm seeing more and more Flash in use across the web, so it's a growing technology space.  The experience of using Highrise to manage tasks and projects is sweet, simple and backed by solid JavaScript and Ruby coders.  More companies are recognizing the importance of front-end engineers.  People are starting to get serious about testability.  This is a fun industry to be in. Ok, so what am I looking forward to in particular?

• Controls Just look what ScottGu's showing here and here- there's a button. there's a datagrid. very good!
• Testing Silverlight apps Learning what designs and developers of rich client apps expect with regards to testing, testability of apps, how test-driven development can work with Silverlight, if designers would find unit tests useful, and so on...
• Learning how people are using Silverlight so that I can do a better job giving people what they expect and want in a rich client platform
• Seeing how people are using the HTML DOM bridge
• Seeing what fluxcapacity's up to
• Networking and hearing what everyone has to say!
• Warmer weather than Seattle's been having

Whether you'll be in Vegas for MIX or not, drop me a line and stay in touch, I'm hoping to post quite a bit about the Silverlight 2 goodness on my blog once I have some time to stop and catch my breath. See you there! My Blog • Twitter • LinkedIn • Facebook • Flickr MIX'08 photos