Wow… it’s at Day 3 that I usually start to fade fast, and this one’s no exception.
Yesterday was awesome…
It began with a Silverlight breakfast meetup with an ever expanding contracting group of folks to name a few: Tim Heuer, Laruent Bugnion (thanks for signing my book and the kind words!), John Papa (again thanks for signing my book and the kind words!), Matthias Shapiro, Bryant Likes (finally met you), Pete Brown, Frank LaVigne, Walt Ritscher, and wow, memory loss on the rest of the people. Laurent took some pictures of the crew so I’ll get one up or link to his.
Then to the keynote to get a front-row seat. I sat in between John Papa and Frank LaVigne and in the company of Bryant Likes, Page Brooks, Pete Brown, and probably others I’ve forgotten only because I’m old :) John has pictures on his blog and he did a great live blog of the event at JohnPapa.net
The Expression Blend, Expression Web, and Silverlight 3 enhancements should leave us all with plenty to absorb over the coming weeks and months.
I attended some great sessions yesterday as well:
Joe Stegman on Silverlight 3 enhancements doing the perspective rotations (or whateverthehellthey’recalled) that we saw at the Summit. Where else do you get to see the back side of a bitmap??
Then lunch and a trip to my truck to drop off books and get my phone which I forgot :(
Ran into Jose Fajardo in the hall… that was a singularly unique experience for me after reading his work for so long… great unassuming guy!
Scott Barnes (MossyBlog) popped up to ‘take my picture’ and it ended up being an interview – geez – I haven’t checked his blog yet this morning to see how he’s using that stuff… maybe a blackmail note will arrive at the house today :)
Then Mike Harsh’s super-secret unnamed session (prior to the keynote) on the Out Of Browser (seems to be known on the blogosphere as OOB) experience… very cool stuff and soooo easy to setup. His one example of a live update didn’t work, but Joe did that in the previous session and it did… just very cool.
Then over to get a front-row seat for Jeff Paries’ Silverlight Animation talk … wow… that guy really KNOWS animation and I’m not talking *just* Silverlight … he knows it and then applies it in Silverlight… great job Jeff… enjoy the rest of MIX now that it’s over :)
Also met Rob Houweling at Jeff’s talk … good to finally meet you in person, Rob!
Met up with Bob Thomson and his crew of Colaab and saw some of the work they’re doing.
Along the way I met Cameron Albert who is working on that awesome Perenthia game that I just now think I’ve been misspelling :( also Azret Botash of Devexpress, Nick Harewood, and Corey Schuman -- the guy that gets to do the *way* cool Silverlight projects! and I know I'm leaving some off… too many people and too many things to do!
Then I went to a focus group put on by an outside contractor for MIX. I was a bit out of my element with people talking about planning their ‘educational budgets’ to come here… WTF is an ‘educational budget’? … lol … but when it came down to the discussion of needing to meet folks and get email response, I realized that I attended a keynote and 3 sessions (pretty much a day of it), and if I count Scott Guthrie as someone that I’ve talked to one-on-one in a much smaller setting, so while we’re not ‘friends’, we’re acquaintances, but Joe, Mike, and Jeff I would call friends. Mike and Jeff for sure… so it’s a different MIX when you know the folks rather than attending with people from the office and not interacting much.
I finished off the day by spending a bunch of time talking with Nadeem and Akhlaq Khan of UltraLearn – thanks again for dinner, Nadeem! I’ll blog about their product, but hit their site and browse around ahead of time!
So here it is 8:03 on Thursday and what am I doing still here at the no-tell-mo-tell… I need to recharge a bit more. Today is going to be very long with the party tonight. So I’m going to skip the morning keynote, and do some networking in the hallway before the first session starts.
So my day looks like this unless something changes:
10:30-11:45 – Seema Ramchandani on Deep Dive into Silverlight graphics
11:45-1:00 – lunch and “Third Place” hanging out
1:00-2:15 – wow choices… I’m leaning toward the Silverlight Streaming talk
2:30-3:45 – Expression Blend with Christian Schormann and Celso Gomes
4:15-5:30 – Corrina Black on SL3 and Design Patterns
Then it gets crazy because I’m triple-booked for events from 6-11pm
Meanwhile I’m going to try to run the blogs and see what I’m up against with all the SL3 bloggers out there… Andy has 3, Pete I know has about 8, Tim has at least one good one Walt referenced… going to be a very busy time catching up! But… I’ll catch up from home… I’ll look at them and save the links here for a bit but then it’s time to head down to the Venetian and Get my MIX on!