MIX 07 Keynote Highlights

Keynote video is up! (it says its a live stream, but its working as a non-live stream for me now)

Just got out of the MIX 07 Keynote w/ Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. The big announcement was the cross platform .Net framework that will ship with silverlight. Keith Smith has a good write up over on his blog.

However, the biggest news for me in the announcements was what Wayne Smith let slip about the next versions of Expression Design and Expression Blend (his segment starts at time code: 00:44:00). The next versions of these products, which will have prerelease versions available soon (or now in the case of Blend). After Wayne demoes the Expressions Media Encoder, a tool for preparing video for web distribution, impressive in its own rite, he shows off the new versions of Design and Blend which feature built in support for Silverlight. This is pretty cool stuff, check it out.

For an overview of the release schedule for all this stuff, check out time code 2:06:00. But I'll give you a hint, there is a ton of stuff available today: Expresions Studio 1.0, Silverlight 1.0 Beta w/ GoLive license, and previews of v.Next Expressions stuff.

At the end of the keynote Michael Arrington of TechCrunch grilled Ray & Scott pretty hard on Microsofts move into the Web design space, a space currently squarely controlled by Adobe. I think Ray skirted the question about Adobe competition, but he and Scott made two things clear 1) choice is good for the marketplace, and Silverlight gives developers a new choice in developing rich browser applications, and 2) Microsofts believes in "software plus services" meaning, harness the hardware to create a great user experience one the form factors you target, and enable useful customer scenarios by hooking that client software into services. Check the interview out at time code  2:08:00.