Microsoft screwed up, and they admit it, when it comes to their internet platform: Internet Explorer. The release schedule was too far between, the releases were not innovative (purely bug fixes) and it seemed, for the longest time, that they basically became a sloth with it. Then came along competition from FireFox and other such browsers and they woke up to the reality that they will need to start innovating on this front again. In order to bring everyone together - their legions of programmers - and say to them, "Hey, look, we screwed up but we're back in the game now and look what we've got for you guys to use when building next generation web applications" they created MIX '06: the conference that I'm at right now.
This morning Bill Gates gave the keynote and introduced people from myspace.com and the BBC - who promptly talked about how leveraging various Microsoft technologies (from SQL server, to ASP.Net 2.0 to DRM) greatly improved their performance and business in general. The facts and figures were stunning in some cases (I'll try to compile them at some point and blog about them). Needless to say, I feel even more comfortable programming in Microsoft's server environment. Bill then had an interview with Tim O'Reilly (as in O'Reilly the books) who seemed more interested in taking the opportunity to make pot shots at Gates and Microsoft than actually ask pertinent questions - I had the displeasure of meeting Tim at a Gnomedex conference one year (I had dinner with him) and the guy is a real turd - real stuck up.
Then came Scott Guthrie from MS who gave a very cool demonstration of building AJAX applications and running them under Safari on OS X. I was impressed and the audience was happy. The demonstration he gave was, of course, only a demonstration and so under real-world stresses I'm not sure how much would hold up - but, nonetheless, I was happy with what I saw.
I went to a couple lectures then out - and the one that ended up being the coolest was the one I missed most of - which was how to create large scale web applications atop Microsoft server technologies. Steve went, so hopefully I can get him to blog about his findings.
The coolest of the ones I went to in full was one on how to develop applications using AJAX. There have been some cool inhancements in the scripting libraries (such as Mozilla and Safari support) which I'm excited about and was happy to see. But, rather than duplicating content I will just point you to the most excellent site on atlas and ajax here.
One final thing to add is that the overall demeanor of this conference is different from that of other MS-sponsored events I've gone to in the past. This one is much more community driven. At one point there were people lined up to actually ask Bill Gates questions - something I've never witnessed before. Small (about 1,000 people) and sleak - the conference rates about a six out of ten on the coolness factor - mostly because of the people I've ran into and the willingness of everyone to talk to everyone else.
The major criticism that I have is that the lectures seem rather short. This could be because the lecturers were expecting more dialog (which very well may be the case), or the conference (being the first year) may suffer from some disorganization as a whole. Tomorrow should tell more.
