This session was conducted by the famed Scott Hanselman. I had been looking forward to this session since I heard he was speaking – one, to meet him, and two, to learn about the MVC framework and design pattern. I had been neglecting my duties as a technologist to follow up on MVC, and this was my time to catch up. Besides, we had already bumped into Scott at the Scavenger Hunt, and he was pretty cool about that.

Here are my notes from the session about ASP.Net MVC and the design pattern

• MVC is a new web project type for ASP.Net
• This type of project is more easily testable
• It is not a replacement for web forms
• This is only an option
• SCOTT HANSELMAN IS HYSTERICAL!
• You must be using .Net 3.5 to be able to create ASP.Net MVC Application Solutions
• Select a testing framework (nUnit, WatiN, etc.)
• 3 new namespaces – System.Web.Mvc, System.Web.Routing, System.Web.Abstractions (Now part of ASP.Net)
• The framework plays well with others – NHibernate for Models, Brail for Views, Whatever for Controllers
• Clean separation of concerns – easy testing, red/green TDD, highly maintainable by default
• Extensible and pluggable
• Clean URLs and HTML – SEO and REST friendly URL structures
• Great integration into ASP.NET
• MVP (Presenter) vs MVC (Controller)
• Request into controller, then to the model for data, then send the data to the View for display
• The http handler does all the interpretation
• Routing is kind of like URL Rewriting – define routes, and the URLs will redirect you to where you need to go
• NHaml, Nvelocity – open source view engines
• ViewEngieneBase – extend to make all kinds of views, iCal, vCard, RSS, etc, etc.
• System.Web.Abstraction – Testing without firing up IIS
• RhinoMocks, TypeMock, nMock, Moq – all kinds of mocking frameworks to use with the abstraction namespace
• TDD – write tests first. You want to see them fail, then write the least possible to make the test pass. Write, rinse, repeat.

I couldn’t believe the amount of information Scott covered. He explained the MVC pattern, the new .Net framework, the new namespaces, gave examples of routing patterns, how to use different view engines, how to mock, and TDD. This was by far one of the best sessions for me in the entire conference.

This was another panel discussion about social networking. Guy Kawasaki was the moderator. Following the Steve Ballmer keynote, he kept things interesting, and asked some of the hard questions. My notes are scattered, and the session was interesting, but one disappointing fact is the panel did not really cover the use of Web 2.0 and Social Networking inside the Corporation. Read on, and download the session from http://www.visitmix.com to see more.

What are the issues?

• Security
• Large horizontals vs niche networks
• Each site behaves as if you have not used any other site before – antisocial
• “Friend” vs “Family” vs “Colleague” – how do you label people
• Privacy, how to give users control over their own data
• Spam issues
• signal to noise problem – how do you overcome that?

Is stalking as much of a problem as the media makes it out to be?

• Companies in this space spend the majority of their time on spam
• Persistent identities prevent the threats
• You can validate they are real people by validating against their email addresses

OpenID

• OpenID begins to persist your identity across sites
• OpenID is useful, and easy to use, but there is no real gaping problem that OpenID solves
• Usage needs to become ubiquitous and under-the-covers to work, like SSL

What about media, photos, events, shopping?

• Entire ecosystems are designed to tie them all together

What about Second Life and World of Warcraft?

• not necessarily a real identity
• there are issues with crime
• users create an alternate reality, rather than extending your actual persona

Casual Games

• These have taken off in Asia
• Games like bejeweled, Tetris, KDice
• They add a social aspect to simple online games

This is a panel session talking about Open Process, Open Source, Open Development, and Open APIs.  The panelists were Mike Schroepfer from Mozilla, Andi Gutmans from Zend, Miguel de Icaza from Novell, Rob Conery from Microsoft, and moderated by Sam Ramji from Microsoft.  The session was interesting… it provided a lot of perspective on how the Open Source community views itself, how it operates, and how it is expanding.  Here are some of the topics that were covered:

• The discussion of patent infringement and Open Source is in conflict
• The idea of Open Data, for example the collection and sharing of personal data for advertising purposes
• The acquisition of Yahoo – PHP will be injected into Microsoft and accelerate open source ideas, PHP now can run on Windows Server 2008
• Debate that opening source code should increase security vs keeping it closed and leveraging Security by Obscurity
• Not a lot of full open source products – DotNetNuke, Druple, but other Open Source APIs like PHP
• Criteria for using open source?  All?  None?  Blended!
• Criteria for making your next project an open source project…?

The second keynote was a one-hour interview format between Guy Kawasaki from Apple and Steve Ballmer from Microsoft. There seemed to be friendly banter between the two of them, and they both seemed to enjoy the session. He is a ham, and plays to the crowd and pulls you into the conversation. What impressed me most was the breadth and depth of knowledge he had on technical and business aspects of Microsoft’s products, services, activities, and acquisitions. I recommend going to the Mix web site, downloading the video for the session, and watching it. It was both informative and entertaining.

There were a lot of questions that were thrown out, so I tried to get the gist of the questions and answers as quickly as I could. Here are my notes. I didn’t get all the questions from Guy and the audience, but I think I got the ones that were most interesting.

1. Q: Why do you wanna buy Yahoo?
   A: Advertising on the Internet will be the next super-big thing. Yahoo is a way to accelerate Microsoft forward.
2. Q: Is it a zero sum game? Do you have to do Google in?
   A: We have to have a strong position in search and online advertising.
3. Q: Are you hunting down Google?
   A: Microsoft is trying to do 4 things, and there are competitors in all of those spaces – Desktop (Apple, Linux), Server & Enterprise (IBM, HP), Entertainment & Devices (Sony, Apple), Online (Google, Google, Google)
4. Q: What about Apple?
   A: They have some market share, but Microsoft has a bigger footprint in the PC arena
5. Q: What about Facebook?
   A: Serious about online advertising, Facebook is a big platforms for advertising. That is where Facebook comes in.
6. Q: You are one of the richest people in the world… what drives you?
   A: Looking forward to doing more great work, look at Silverlight! I wanna change the world, work with smartest energetic fun people. I love a challenge.
7. Q: What does Steve Ballmer do?
   A: I have 3 types of days – 1) working out of Redmond, work with customers from 7:30 am, 8 at night, 2) Doctor’s in the office – every hour I will have a meeting all day long, 3) There are days where I can think , write, and research.
8. Q: How much email do you get?
   A: 60, 70 emails a day – steveb@microsoft.com
   
9. Q: Where is Bill at? Where is Microsoft post-Bill?
   A: He will be Part Time, Full time in the foundation, working special projects, and taking time off this summer
10. Q: What’s the marketing pitch to a young person to work at Microsoft?
    A: not that different than 25 years ago. really wanna work on things that will change the world.
11. Q: How does Halo 3, Guitar Hero, Rock band fit in the Microsoft Strategy?
    A: These are products that people are passionate about, 17 million Xbox users, 11 million Xbox Live users
12. Q: What’s the plans and long term goal of Silverlight?
    A: As the Internet & PC have grown up, they have forced users to take a fork in the road – use broadly available & easy to deploy applications, or have rich interaction. We are trying to bring those two things together, without compromises.
13. Q: What are the numbers around Silverlight?
    A: It was launched a year ago, we are shipping 1.5 million downloads a day, and there are still lots of opportunities. Windows update already puts WPF on the desktop.
14. Q: What’s the deal with Vista?
    A: The cries from the masses were to focus on security, so we did. Now there are some issues with application compatibility & driver compatibility. We have taken feedback, turned around with SP1, and updated the drivers.
15. Q: How can you do all these things well?
    A: not an option to do one thing, we have to be good at them all.
16. Firefox and IE. What’s happening there?
    A: Firefox is gaining market share, built up a lot of new developer features in in IE8, and there is lots more to come.
17. Q: What about IE on the Mac?
    A: of all the key innovations, that is not the top on the list… teasing… it is smarter for us to apply innovation in other areas
18. Q: Social networking… what’s the Microsoft perspective?
    A: People will be using the Internet more richly. It’s not a fad. The Internet has changed forever.
19. Q: what about opening APIs on social Microsoft?
    A: We are already providing open interfaces on a lot of stuff. There is lots more to come there too.
20. Q: What about Adobe?
    A: Yes Silverlight may be a competitor, but we have integrated PDF into our office apps too.
21. Q: why wasn’t IE part of the evolution of .Net since they are both web solutions?
    A: IE was part of the progression of the OS. Lesson is learned.
22. Q: If Yahoo moves over to MS, what about all the PHP apps?
    A: Microsoft shouldn’t have 2 of everything. if PHP apps are better than a Microsoft solution, PHP will be in production and supported for a long time. Microsoft will become a PHP shop too.
23. Q: What are the synergies with Yahoo?
    A: Scale is an advantage in the search game, more search, more advertising, more bidding on keywords, more revenue, more reinvestment.
24. Q: What about FAST Search & queryless search?
    A: This is in the middle of regulatory review, they have a great technology and a great team.
25. Q: Talk about the acquisition of Danger
    A: Danger provides Microsoft way to do consumer oriented services on Windows Mobile
26. Q: Will Silverlight be used for Hotmail, etc?
    A: This will happen when existing products are re-released. We still have issues getting Silverlight on the desktop.
27. Q: What about Amalga, HealthVault?
    A: Healthcare is the only vertical that we have dug in deeply. It is the least well-served by IT.
28. Q: The format wars. Blu-Ray has won. Now what for Microsoft?
    A: We are not a hardware shop. We will just shift support. Will it really matter? Will rich media may be delivered over the Internet instead of on discs? Maybe.

There are two new features that Microsoft is announcing the Beta1 version of Internet Explorer 8.  These two new features are Activities and WebSlices, as mentioned in the keynote. 

Activities

• XML installed to the browser using the OpenService Format
• There are a few simple components that make up an activity – Category, Context, Execute, and Preview
• Category – This is a way to group the different Activities you add – in this example, it is Maps
• Context – text that shows up in the context menu, context is typically “selection”, which will use the text that you have highlighted
• Execute – the actual URL that will be launched, with {selection} in curly brackets to dynamically pass the selection
• Preview – setting this will allow for a mouseover preview – action is a URL, requires parameters for size and selection

WebSlices

• Little purple button letting user know you can subscribe to the WebSlice
• An item is added to the favorites bar
• This can be eBay items, Facebook friends, Stumbleupon, NY Times most emailed articles, etc.
• WebSlices is based on hAtom Microformats
• These are implemented using style classes – some from hAtom (entity-title, entity-content), some are new (hslice)
• You must have a unique ID on an hslice
• Leverages and expands the Windows Feeds Platform shipped with IE7
• Also takes advantage of improved links bar – bold is updated, italics is expiring soon, and gray is expired
• Converts WebSlices into an Atom Feed
• Update schedule in the browser from once a day to every 15 minutes
• Use the TTL  class type to determine time-to-live that will be respected
• You can also define alternative feed URLs, and an end time
• The hover behaviors can be hidden to prevent hover behavior conflicts.  If you do this, it is easy to add a button that will add the WebSlice instead.  The same API can be used for links and feeds.
• If you need a username & password to get to the original content, the WebSlice dialog will ask for it to update the WebSlice
• Feeds should be used for lists of items instead of just a piece of page content

Conclusion

This is a preview of some of the new developer features in IE8.  There will be lots more to come, including new user-centric features.  Based on what I have seen, that should be very exciting stuff too!

This session is to be geared to how Silverlight is used in advertising and media delivery.  Following the last few acquisitions of Microsoft’s, and listening to the keynote, they are going to be focusing on advertising a lot more now and in the future.  With my current focus on Brand sites at BMS, this is a topic of great interest.

Polite Advertising

• Polite advertising is a way of delivering a small banner advertisement, and provide lots more information to the user inline, on demand, when requested. 
• Polite ads should have a fast initial load time and render very quickly
• They should also not block the rest of the page from downloading. 
• Incremental elements should download later, and do so asynchronously
• There are two techniques to polite advertising with Silverlight – Splash Screens, and Xap Loads Xap
• Splash Screen – Static splash screen while larger incremental downloads
• XAP loads XAP – same idea, but you can download other components as needed

Cross Domain Support

• Ads are typically sourced and tracked at different domains from the page content
• The default behavior for servers is to throw an Access Denied error
• By adding Policy files, you allow access to specific domains
• You can use Flash policy files, or Silverlight Specific ones – ClientAccessPolicy.xml

Tracking events

• Silverlight has a rich event model
• You can track activity with mouse interaction, or you can use container state (i.e. size, shape, etc)
• User click-throughs spawn new page, and then send a ping to an ad tracking servers

EyeWonder

• Work with Atlas and DoubleClick
• Leverages their custom InStream Advertising Roadmap workflow
• By providing additional interactivity & tracking in advertising, you gain more information about your customer
• As the add is planned, built, and purchased, EyeWonder ensures the ad fits within the parameters of the host site (ad size, file size, bit rate, etc)

Conclusion

This session provided a lot of new information about the design, development, and deployment of banner advertising, and how it will be impacted by the improvements in Siverlight.  I will probably wind up downloading and watching this session again.

For session 2 I had selected a session on Advanced Search Engine Optimization.  It sounded like the session was right up my alley.  My hopes were high. 

Search Engine – Crawling, Ranking, Finding

Search Engines do three basic things – crawl, rank, and find. 

• Crawling – search engines start with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, and follow links from there
• Ranking – Each page is ranked according to certain criteria – inbound links (basically an endorsement of other sites – either high quality, low quality, or links with penalty); outbound links; note that subdomains are treated very differently than subdirectories.
• Searching – simple process – check spelling, determine intent, fulfillment of search request with results, determine results order

Building Pages

• Use HTML Semantically !!
• H1 (SEO good) vs spans & styles (SEO bad)
• A – used for ranking, test in link is important, use something descriptive
• H1 – only 1 per page, most important page topic
• Title – critical for determining keywords, relevance, and page content
• Meta tags – description is what the user will see… without one, the crawler will have to guess at the page’s description based on content
• JavaScript & CSS – don’t use JavaScript navigation, host css externally

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)

• These tend to look like black boxes to the search engines
• Noscript tags are your friend !!
• Validate your HTML – it makes the job of the crawler easier
• 3 types of pages, based on your SEO goals
• Monolithic – like mail.live.com – don’t want it to be searched
• Linkable – bmw.com – each car is a separate page, with a rich experience on that page
• Crawlable – lots of content, all HTML based

HTTP Status Codes

• 200 OK – Page returned just fine without any errors
• 404 Page Not Found – good for customers, bad for search engines – never removes pages from search engines
• 301 Permanent Redirect – instead of throwing the 404, use this for a moved domain, etc.
• 302 Moved Temporarily – confusing to users and to search engines, don’t use this.
• 304 Not Modified – conditional get, only if search engine has latest version,
• 503 Down for Maintenance – great to use if your server will be down temporarily, the crawler knows to come back
• For more, visit W3C for standards for http status codes

Site Evaluation – Mix Site

• Do a search for mix08 – the visitmix.com site is not the top result
• Across the search engines, you get no title, and no description
• Blogs are beating out mix site !
• The site has a JavaScript redirect – BAD!
• 16,000 inbound links to the index.html page, no server side redirect
• 5700 inbound links to the default.aspx page – a lot less
• http://www.visitmix.com vs visitmix.com vs visitmix.com/default.aspx – all 3 are different to the crawlers, choose one option and stick with it, use 301 redirects for other two

Other Notes

• URL Rewriting in asp.net – there is a whitepaper by Scott Guthrie
• Soft 404s (a page that gives content or a redirect to the homepage) is great for users, but bad for search engines.  There is a workaround for soft 404
• Case Matters, particularly for apache, mono, etc.
• There is another whitepaper called How to optimize Silverlight for search – read it!!
• A good idea to make XAML understandable to crawlers is to create XSLT to reflect XAML
• There is a Tools Review slide – we are using most already
• Gatineau – AdSense Analytics – a competitor to Google Analytics (maybe this plays nicer with .Net and Silverlight?)
• Canonicalization of URLs – include www or not, and force a redirect server side to stay consistent
• Cloaking is bad
• Sub-domains do not carry pagerank juice like a directory or subpage will
• Underscores are bad (one word vs multiple, usability), dashes are better

Conclusion

I had high expectations for this session, since its title promised Advanced topics in SEO.  Most of the session was review.  Some of the more interesting things I walked away with were the brief tips on Silverlight, and on the importance of canonicalization of your site. 

There are lots of similarities and lots of differences in the way Silverlight operates as compared to Flash.  This session covers some of those, as well as some of the improvements to Silverlight 2 Beta 1. 

Basics

• In Silverlight 2, all objects now inherit from the userControls base class. 
• In Flash, X and Y are properties, you could create a “ball” object, and get and set X and Y as properties to make it more like Flash
• The Point object is similar to the mouse object in Flash.  Create a Point and call it mouse, and the C# starts to look a lot like ActionScript in Flash.

The Helvetica of Easing Algorithms

• This is a cool and very simple effect that is used regularly in Flash. 
• Using storyboards and the X and Y properties you just created, you can calculate the distance between the click point and an object (a ball, etc), take a percentage(like 12% or 20%), and continually call the storyboard, making the object move across the canvas. 
• Something like ball.X += (ball.X – mouse.X)*.12 , and the same for Y
• The default frame rate for Silverlight is 60 frames per second, as opposed to 40 for Flash

User Controls that Govern Themselves

• Instead of having the storyboards for child objects in the parent class, you can put them right into the user controls. 
• The ability to remove an item is very easy to do in Flash.  It’s a bit more complex in Silverlight.
• You can just remove it from the canvas’s Children collection, but that is a real bad idea for RIA applications that are data intensive!!  You can instead raise an event and bubble it up to the parent, and let the parent handle it. 

One Function to Rule Them All

• You can have a method in the user control that will add behaviors to the objects on the canvas, such as duration, movement, transparency, etc. 
• The presenter ran out of time, and moved the coverage of the rest of this idea into the OpenSpace sessions

Where did my downloader go?

• This is a big difference from Silverlight 1.1
• There used to be great object to get handle on images, etc. called the downloader object
• Now in version 2, you need to create a WebClient stream object and stream it into the Silverlight object
• Or, you can also use the BitmapImage and import it from the local directory

Conclusion

Even though the presenter did not get to cover all the material he wanted to, it was actually a good session to connect some of my Flash experience and .Net experience and blend it into some Silverlight code.

Ray Ozzie

Ray Ozzie kicked off the Mix08 conference with launch announcements.  New Beta1 versions have been released of Internet Explorer 8, Silverlight 2.0, IIS 7, Windows Office Live, SQL Server Data Services, and a New Expression site (expression.microsoft.com), just to name a few.  Ray focused on the impact of Content, Commerce & Community on Microsoft’s strategy.  He discussed the shift to Utility Computing – the iea of Business services to have servers in the Internet Clout that host Exchange, SharePoint, Office Suite, etc. instead of in the data center.  There will be a new focus on software’s impact on advertising, which is very exciting.  Another idea that Ray Ozzie discussed was the Web as a hub.  People will move away from the idea of “My Computer”, and towards a collection of devices that are connected and aware of each other via the web.  Software and services will be more loosely joined, to add reusability.   He discussed 5 different areas of focus – connected devices, connected entertainment, connected productivity, connected business, and connected development. 

Scott Guthrie

Scott Guthrie covered the more technical side of the keynote.  He outlined the topics he would be covering – Standards based web development, and 3 Silverlight topics – UI, TCO, and Monetization.  He also announced a bit of a roadmap for ASP.Net.  New components to come are ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net AJAX, ASP.Net Dynamic Data.  He also announced a new beta release of Microsoft Expression would be available right after the keynote. 

Internet Explorer 8

Dean Hachamovitch gave a demonstration of the new beta version of IE8.  He had a list of 8 things to share about the new IE8:

1. CSS 2.1 – biggest impact from W3C
2. CSS Certification – 702 test cases submitted to the W3C to verify CSS 2.1 for any browser, Microsoft has made these available under the BSD License
3. Performance – more in line with Firefox and Safari – a huge improvement from IE7
4. HTML 5 support – better AJAX support, connection events for page scripting, and DOM storage
5. New Developer Tools – built in script debugging, style tracing, and much more
6. Activities – new extendable in-browser services, using their new OpenService Specification.  Some examples of activities include eBay, StumbleUpon, Google Maps, etc. Just highlight the text, and activate!
7. WebSlices – based on the new WebSlices Specification, users can subscribe to parts of web pages like an Atom feed, and track and preview right in the Favorites bar.
8. Beta 1 available right after keynote – http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8

Silverlight 2

Silverlight 2 is a huge improvement from both 1.0 and 1.1.  Here are the comments I furiously recorded during the keynote:

• Silverlight is downloaded 1.5 million times per day
• Silverlight 2 Beta 1 is available for download !!
• Partnership between Microsoft and Move Networks to implement Adaptive streaming – determine appropriate bit rate to use based on bandwidth and CPU usage, can switch between bit rates on the fly
• Recently launched Windows Media Services 2008 – available free, will run on Windows Server 2008
• IIS 7 Media Pack – ability to set a bit rate throttle per media type
• Multi-language support – JS, VB, C#, Iron Python, Iron Ruby
• Data Mining Support, LINK, data caching
• Rich skinning and styling
• Robust networking support – REST, RSS, Web Services, socket support
• Small Download, Fast Install, 4.3 MB download, 10 seconds to install. 
• Available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and you don’t need the .Net Framework
• New higher level controls are available  – sliders, calendar, Data Grid, etc. – open source for you to download (and modify if you want)
• Unit tests for UI and Non-UI functionality in an open source license
• SharePoint extensions to build Silverlight WebParts

Other Demos

Scott Guthrie took the opportunity to bring up a slew of Microsoft partners to give demos of some of the work they were doing:

John Harris – Silverlight Rich Advertising Scenarios

• Added a Silverlight Ad template in Visual Studio
• Video.show – a blueprint on CodePlex for implementing a video content site
• Integration with Microsoft’s Atlas Solutions Atlas AdManager
• Overlay advertising easily on to videos with lots of functionality

Ari Paparo – VP Advertiser Products, DoubleClick

• Integrate DoubleClick’s Instream product with Silverlight
• Define events in advertising to track user experiences and possibly deliver new content for each of them

Perkins Miller – Sr. VP Digital Media, NBC Sports & Olympics

• Committed to putting 2200 hours of Olympics video online, across 34 sports, for 17 days
• NBCOlympics.com
• Combination of the data and the video
• Ability to do Picture in Picture, Send to a Friend, 4 streams simultaneously when live video
• Commercials are integrated right into the video

Roy Ben-Yoseph and Eric Hoffman from AOL

• Rebuilding their online mail client in Silverlight
• Focus on performance – just make it faster
• Close to 50 million email users
• Functionality is more like a desktop application than a web application
• Demonstrated the plain black & white standard skin and easily change to the Halo 3 video based skin

Sean Dee – VP Chief Marketing Officer – Hard Rock, Scott Stanfield – CEO – Vertigo

• Seadragon Deep Zoom Technology
• Hard Rock is taking their collection to the web – Memorabilia 2.0
• One image is 2 Billion Pixels !!
• Now available on hardrock.com

Marek Reichman – Director of Design – Aston Martin

• Control 3 aspects of the Aston Martin experience – Online, in the Dealership, and Ownership
• Deep Zoom for interior details
• Integration of Web, PC, UMPC, Mobile, and In-Car Computer for an immersive experience

Krista Monson – Head of Casting – Cirque de Soleil

• 6 Resident shows, 9 touring shows, over 3000 employees
• Line of Business HR application – Interviewing prospective performers
• Offline functionality and synchronization
• Review interviews and videos back at the office
• Scott Guthrie doesn’t have a chance as a juggler in Cirque de Soleil

Scott Guthrie – WPF Demo

• Implementation of a Physics Engine
• Complex dynamic changes to images and videos with filters – CPU usage never above 15 to 20%
• Demonstrates the push of work down to the Hardware (i.e. Video Card) instead of CPU usage

Silverlight for Mobile

• Implementation of the same code, assets, skills, and tools for desktop, the Web, and Mobile platforms
• These kind of rich experiences will be everywhere

Darren David – CEO – Stimulant

• Silverlight application called Mixer – Where is the party at?
• Social application for Venues, Friends, and Mood
• Windows Mobile 6 deployed, but written on the desktop

Lee Williams – Senior VP, Nokia

• Nokia will be delivering Silverlight on their phones

Tamir Melamed – VP of Engineering – WeatherBug

• Leading provider of live local weather information – updated locally every 2 secodns
• API available – API.weatherbug.com
• same app on the phone is on the web – silverlight.weatherbug.com
• View the radar, have it animated, hourly forecasts, daily forecasts, alerts
• Add snow to the graphics
• Couldn’t do any of this with Flash Light and have it perform

Wrap-up

This was a jam-packed Keynote, with lots of exciting announcements, great demos, and lots of things to come.  I hope the rest of the conference is this great!.

The Flight

Today I arrived in Las Vegas for the Mix 08 conference. After our airplane had taxied out to the tarmac for takeoff, the pilot informed us that since we were going to Las Vegas, our lucky number for the week would be 34. That was the number of planes in front of us on the tarmac waiting to take off. So we got to wait for an hour while all the traffic ahead of us took off. Ready, set, wait.

The Hotel

Got to the airport and to the Venetian Hotel just fine. Checked in, and the room was just as nice as last year, but they have upgraded it a bit. Everything looked shiny and new, and the CRT televisions were replaced with LCD TVs – three of them. One in the Sitting Room, one in the bedroom, and one in the bathroom (because you have to have a TV in the bathroom). Tested the wireless in the room, and it looked like everything is all set for a great Mix 08.

The Scavenger Hunt

I went to get a bite to eat, and bumped into Rob. After eating, we registered, and went to freshen up for the “Bring Silver to Light” event we signed up for. All we knew is that it was a scavenger hunt, and were looking forward to some fun.

We walked over to the Treasure Island Hotel, and found the Ballroom where the event was. We met the rest of the Blanchefleur team – Kerri Sweeney and Kirti Chandratreya from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, and Michael Iantosca who owns his own consulting group eDefine, and works with them onsite. We poured over the rules, and the items we had to find in the hunt. There were lots of places to go – The Venetian, The Mirage, The Palazzo, Treasure Island, and the Fashion Show Mall. We had 14 photos to take, and 3 bonus items to find. We had to incorporate a sign with the word Silver on it, a Silverlight sticker, and a beam of light from the included flashlight. The folks from Boston had some great ideas, we had some great ideas, and really gelled together nicely. We had a few open questions, like finding a Silverlight Luminary, where can we find Elvis, and whether we would make it all the way to the Fashion Show Mall, but those would play themselves out. We took the list, and headed out onto the Vegas Strip.

Some of the benefits of the gelled team came out quickly – we had a great idea to get a picture of Elvis – Madame Tussaud’s! The manager there let us in with a discounted rate, since we were on the scavenger hunt for the conference (gratuitous pitch to Visit Madame Tussaud’s at the Venetian Hotel).

The most interesting thing that happened to us was while we were walking around the Venetian, I spotted Scott Hanselman coming down the escalator. I immediately yelled out, “Hey! There’s Scott Hanselman! He can be our Silverlight Luminary” He turned around and walked over. We plowed through the awkward moment and told him the whole story of our scavenger hunt. We had to convince him that this was for real. He kept saying, “All I want to do is register for the conference.” He let us take his photo with the Silver sign, and we helped him find the registration booth. Thank you, Scott, for your graciousness.

We took the photos back to the Treasure Island Ballroom, struggled with the Silverlight app that wouldn’t play nice, and had a few beers. We laughed about our experiences, about the other teams that took themselves too seriously, and wondered if we would win the big prize. Either way, we made some friends, saw Las Vegas, got some fresh air, and had a great time.

The Update

The Prizes awarded for winning the Bring Silver to Light Scavenger Hunt included free Microsoft software and a 8GB Zune. Unfortunately, the Blanchefleur team did not win the grand prize. We also did not win the second place prize. And, we were not one of three teams to tie for third place either. We didn’t get anything. But we all had a lot of fun.