Denny Boynton

Wow, it has been quite a day here at MIX -- I hardly know where to begin.

As Ray Ozzie started his keynote this morning, he talked about some new concepts in application categories that reall make a lot of sense. First, there is the idea of the "universal web application," or an app that lives solely online and is accessed via the browser. Then he talked about the "experience first" application, an app that runs on the desktop and can heavily leverage the resources of the desktop. So ok, we've given some new names to web and winform apps, or so I thought.

He then touched on SaaS and put a new context around it: Don't think of things as "software as a service," but "software plus a service," meaning that the most successful applications in the future will leverage the desktop to render a magnificent user experience while leverage services in the cloud to leverage the power of distributed computing. Now, this made me feel smart because I've been evangelizing this approach for years. The problem was that when people asked me how to do it with the current .NET stack, I couldn't give them a good answer.

Not anymore. Enter Silverlight and the Expressions Suite of products. Things are going to be very different from now on.

So here's a summary of the announcement made today:

• Silverlight beta is available for download as of today. It's free. Go get it!
• Expressions Suite shipped as of this morning. The demos that were shown of these new tool were amazing. They are tightly integrated with each other and Visual Studio "Oracs." The Suite consists of:
• Web (self-explanitory)
• Blend (WYSIWYG XAML design application)
• Design (graphic design application, tight integration with Blend)
• Media (a media encoding and preparation tool)
• The .NET CLR will be fully supported in Silverlight 1.1 alpha. That is huge. You be able to run .NET on the client machine via a web browser, and not just on a Windows box. You'll be able to run it on a Macintosh as well in Firefox, Safari and Opera.
• There are several features being built into Visual Studio "Orcas" that will make developing for these next-gen application much easier, including the ability to perform cross-platform remote debugging. You read that right. Scott Guthrie did a demonstration showing how you can set a debugging breakpoint, fire up the app on the Mac, attach to the process running on the Mac in "Orcas" and hit the breakpoint in Visual Studio. That was about the coolest thing I've ever seen. And it's working in the beta product!
• Silverlight Streaming was also announced. This is a new service being offered in the Live stack. For the first year, you will be able to upload your streaming media files to the SilverlightStreaming service, store them there and access them in your applications. And get this, you'll get 4GB of storage for your media. For all the goodies on this, checkout silverlight.live.com. I'm going to start using this today!
• Support for dynamic languages in the .NET CLR, including the new IronRuby. That's correct Ruby fans, soon you'll be able to take advantage of everything above and write your code in Ruby. Nice, eh?

Wow, there was so much more, but these are the big items. As this stuff starts to sink in, I'll be writing a lot more about it, especially after I've had the chance to play with it for awhile.

I highly recommend you check out www.silverlight.net and silverlight.live.com.

Here are a couple of pics from this morning's event. More to come...

Technorati tags: MIX07, Silverlight, Iron Ruby, Expression