well, some pretty good news coming out of mix07 today...here's a quick recap...

• release of Silverlight 1.0 beta supporting ajax/javascript
• release of Silverlight 1.1 alpha supporting .net programming model
• announcing cross-platform (windows/mac) .net as a part of Silverlight 1.1 alpha
• announcing support for dynamic languages (ruby, python out of the gate) as a part of Silverlight 1.1 alpha
• rtm of expression studio
• preview of expression blend v2 (supporting richer Silverlight development)
• expression media encoder preview for Silverlight
• Silverlight streaming by Windows Live

whew, that is a lot to swallow.  i'm most excited about the cross-platform .net and support for dynamic languages.  with microsoft providing a ruby implementation, i wonder who will build a rails implementation first...ahem...hint.

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!

i've loaded up bootcamp v1.2 on my mac and loaded vista on a second partition.  the process was painless really and i haven't seen any performance lag.  i decided against parallels and coherence mode, etc. as i was reading an article (in macworld) that showed the bootcamp option being the best performing option.

anyhow, my mac is "mac-fu" and my vista partition machine name is "mac-fu-vista."  when i went into do some sharing on the mac side, i noticed that my machine name was correct:

but when i enabled windows sharing, it said that items could be referenced using:

interesting...i'll have to tinker around a bit to see why that is seeing that.  incidentally, if you are looking for a simple tool to help you manage/create shares for osx, check out sharepoints...very simple user interface and does all the lifting for you.

the virtual earth team just announced that virtual earth 5 api has been released!  this looks like a pretty significant upgrade from what i can tell.  i already switched an app i'm working on to using it and a lot of existing code didn't work.  simple adding of pushpins has changed, etc.  but with change comes GREAT customization -- well done team!

take a look and start using it!!!

i was walking in our local mall the other day and noticed that they have completely done away with the standard poster advertising and hired a company called "eye" to install huge plasma displays and rotate advertising on them -- it is much more eye-catching (as the ads are dynamic) and much more appealing.  i walked around and saw one the other day:

looking closer here you go:

nice.  well, at least they are running windows :-)