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My numbering of the days makes sense until I get too large a number, so I just said “Last Day” … :)

I’m soooo bad with names and there’s so much people and information overload… I think I need to start doing what Jesse Liberty and Tim Heuer were doing, and that’s taking a picture of everyone they collected a business card from…. or take notes :)

I realized after I posted earlier that I had spent some time waiting for that first event on Thursday night talking with Rob Burke.We had some great conversation and I had him mixed with someone else when I blogged obviously.

Another developer that I met early on and keep forgetting to mention is Brian Henderson. Great guy from Seattle, and I can’t go any further without mentioning John Stockton! … he was one of the breakfast club on Wednesday! (Brian may have been there too… too long ago!)

Friday I woke up tired… or had too little sleep maybe.

I intended to hang out at 3rd Place since I was going to be leaving at noon.

I went to Seema Ramchandani’s talk on Building an Optimized Graphics-Intensive Application for Silverlight and it was great… got her blog down so I can check out that material. I sat behind Mike Harsh and next to Steve Commisso. When I had checked email earlier, CigDem (CrocusGirl) had started following me on Twitter. About 2 minutes later I feel a touch on my shoulder and she introduces herself. I had forgotten she was going to be there, so that was a nice surprise meeting one of the few female Silverlight bloggers outside of Microsoft!

I combined my ‘meet and greet’ in 3rd Place then with introducing CigDem to various and sundry Silverlight folks. Gotta make and keep that network humming :)

I ran into Galen Murdock of Veracity and got one of those awesome TShirts with the acronyms arranged in a star on the back… thanks Galen, and I look forward to exchanging email with you.

After saying goodbye to everyone, I ran into Bryant Likes maybe two times in different areas of the Venetian on my way to the shops … go figure!

A bit of shopping, then to my truck and down the road. For those of you that asked, I wrote down the “going over Hoover Dam” experience:

From the time I hit the first backup north of the Dam until I was freely moving south of the dam, I traveled 5.1 miles. That 5.1 miles took 43 minutes!

One stop in Kingman for gas, then to the house.

Another MIX in the taillights and I must say I enjoyed every minute!

If I could change any one thing about MIX for next year, it would be to NOT have it only two weeks apart from the Summit… whew… what a month!

Now to try to catch up on blogging Silverlight :)

If I met you at MIX, stay in touch, if I didn’t, email is always cool anyway!

Stay in the ‘Light!

Yeah, yeah… I’m late… the farther I got into MIX the slower everything else became :)

And I’m going to track the last two days just for me so I know where my time all went!

I finally got to the Venetian about 9:30 on Thursday. I was kinda/sorta trying to decide if I just wanted to go to third place or Seema’s talk when I ran into Ivan from SilverlightShow and we had never really had ‘that talk’ we wanted to do. We did that, and I know I still left some open spaces in the continuum, but we’re trying to come up with a way to help merge our content or the dissemination thereof without either of us losing our identity… opinions?

So while standing there, who walks up but Koen Zwikstra of SilverlightSpy fame! … very nice guy… spent too long talking with him and Ivan and Seema’s room was full… sorry Koen :(

Off to 3rd Place and found out I missed a good breakfast plus kept getting spanked by everyone for missing the keynote… I’ll watch the video OK? :)

There was a crowd hanging around in one spot and I could see some guy in the center of attention that I thought was an entertainer. You know the last couple years they’ve had Elvis impersonators walking around. This guy had on a jacket that looked like he mugged a 70’s lounge singer… fit him like it was tailor-made for him. I asked Tim Heuer who the guy in the jacket was … lol … it was Ward Bell of IdeaBlade! After everyone sort of settled down I did talk to him, because he and Michael Davis of IdeaBlade had both exchanged email with me recently. Ward is a great guy and downright entertaining. You know you’re going to have to find another jacket for next year, Ward!!!  I’ll blog more about IdeaBlade later.

Finally met Matt Casto, and talked a bunch with him and the normal ever-expanding-contracting conversations^TM :)

Went to lunch with Matt and Tim Hibner. The guy in front of me in line turned around and it was Koen… like yesterday with Page Brooks, today Koen and I keep running into each other.

A phone call home, then 3rd Place to hang out and talk with folks again… skipped the Streaming session.

Scott Guthrie had his Q/A session and he hung around for absolutely Ever after it was over talking with everyone. I finally decided to do the total geek thing and went up to have my picture taken with him… thanks Corey for doing the honors with the camera! And thanks Scott for being such a gracious guy:

Went to Christian Schormann’s Expression Blend talk with Walt Ritscher. That was very cool… the stuff they’ve done with Blend is nothing short of amazing. The sketchpad and feedback capabilities that you write in overlays on the prototype forms are just way cool. Dummy data so we don’t have to code that up, etc, etc…

Then my last session of the day was Corrina Black’s User Experience Design Patterns for Business Apps with Silverlight 3. Excellent job on not only engagingly getting your points across, Corrina, but also showing off the tools.

Some take-aways I got prior to scanning the video once more:

7 Principles of Design

• Simplicity
• Visibility
• Metaphor
• Natural Mappings
• Constraints
• Error Prevention
• Consistency

Design Patterns

• Orientation
• Navigation
• Input
• Analysis
• Action

Attributes

• Color
• Typography
• Iconography
• Effects
• Animation

Then it was supposed to be off to the dinner at Tao Lago (Logo?), and I hiked off with Tim Heuer, but he apparently didn’t know about that one and we ended up at what was going to be the one I was going to miss… and ended up being better other than the fact that we didn’t have food.

It didn’t open until sometime after 6 so there was some dead-time and talking and banter with all the guys. Finally got inside and they met us at the door with beer and what looked like blue KoolAid… I told them I already drank the KoolAid … or I wouldn’t be here :)

Was talking with Corey Schuman, Steve Commisso, and Page Brooks when the party arrived in the person of Corey Miller, Pete Brown, and Frank Lavigne… If you haven’t spent some time with Corey then you won’t understand… he tends to bring his own party … have him tell you the story of the picture on his phone that he left unattended!

Then the noise started and I finally succeeded in pairing up Koen with Page, then met up with Inseok Gong of Huge Flow that I met at the summit, and he introduced me to Gilbok Lee, who he was there with to do a presentation.

Finally Jeff Paries, Page Brooks, and I wandered out of there and over to where the Insiders Silverlight MIXer was going to be. Much quieter except we were outside and twice during the evening Treasure Island did their pirate thing with cannon sounds and fireworks. But other than that it was very nice to sit on the patio and talk without having to yell.

This party was amazing… and thanks John Papa for heading it up. He got sponsorship from Devexpress, Infragistics, telerik, SilverlightShow, and Microsoft – and a big thanks to all of them as well!

This was a combination of the WPF and Silverlight Insiders crew and the WPF Disciples, so you can imagine it was a big crowd. Ward was there with his jacket… Tim Sneath, Adam Kinney, I’m not even going to try to name-drop … suffice it to say if that room had exploded, pretty much everyone you can name off the top of your head in Silverlight and WPF would have been gone :)

Drawings for many licenses for products, a Kindle, and a MacBook Air took place at 10:30 – seriously! Then when we all left we got a bag with swag … license cards, TShirts, a 4G “Swiss Army” USB from Devexpress, and an 8G Zune… wow!

Got back to the EconoLodge at about 11:00 and was exhausted!

What a day, and what a MIX!