It’s been about a week since Mix10. It was my first Mix10 and I was quite impressed with things I saw there. Of course, my attention was mostly on Silverlight4 and how it can be used in real-world business context. Overall, it was interesting and very useful for me, but I hoped they had more examples of real-world situations rather than tutorial-like how-to stuff about the features. I saw few good examples from couple of short sessions but that was about it.

Inevitably, I found myself comparing Silverlight4 with Flex3 (not 4) constantly whenever their new features involve something that can be done in Flex for a long time. By the time conference is over, I realized the real value of using Silverlight4 might not be on Silverlight4 itself, but rather Visual Studio IDE and the workflow MS came up with SketchFlow and ExpressionBlend. I’m no designer but I’m experienced enough to know that the smooth transition between designers and developer save a lot of time, efforts and frustration. If their workflow can streamline this process, I’m all for that. Only problem now is the cost associated with two different sets of development tools.

There were so many things going on in the conference including very exciting announcement about Windows Phone 7 series and IE9, also good sessions about UX in general. If anyone’s interested, all the videos are up on Mix10 website (http://live.visitmix.com/).

I’ve been taking some time looking at the Silverlight recently and found myself pleasantly surprised by some aspects of Silverlight. I work mostly with Flex3 these days, and as an Adobe certified Flex developer, I almost wanted to settle with Flex and not looking at anything else. But of course, anyone know me would agree I’m not that kind of developer. I believe there’s the best solution for every problem and it doesn’t always mean one tool or language is right for everything.

Looking at Silverlight for few weeks, I feel like I made a right decision of getting to know more about it. I definitely need to learn more about the upcoming Silverlight 4 but overall, I was quite impressed with the workflow and the developer-centric IDE that I always appreciated as a .NET developer.

Now I’m ready for Mix10 conference next week. I’m curious how Microsoft would picture the future of Web and RIA development.