the first night of mix yielded a few pre-parties. i first went to the regional director dinner event, where we were able to chat with a few microsoft regional directors who happen to be at mix this year. of particular note is scott stanfield from vertigo. they are demonstrating (and you can see it/download the source) a really slick wpf application called Family.Show which is essentially a visualization tool for family history information...very cool, check it out.
after that (and actually a little bit before) i went to the mashup day area (which will be going on as well monday night stay tuned for more on that). after that i headed to the 'bloggerzone' -- which i'm pretty sure is basically one of the channel 9 guys' suite room that was opened up to host a party for bloggers. a little crackdown, a little guitar hero, breakfast food (?), and some great conversations around how amazon s3 has saved certain companies money, etc.
i had a chance to finally meet phil haack. what?! name doesn't ring a bell? well, this blog here is hosted on the Subtext platform. Subtext is a fork of the .Text engine. phil was the man that started the movement and what has become one of the more active open source microsoft platform projects (there are others, but i think Subtext needs some creds here as well). i recorded a part of my conversation with phil which you can hear on my *cast link (or direct here). he's a great guy and has a good suggestion for microsoft at the end of the conversation.
more to come from mix07!