Belated Notes about Mix10

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/).