Attended mostly the design tracks today since most of the Orcas and Atlas stuff can be quite easily found on the web. Was interested to listen more on the video   aspects of Silverlight.

Had been reading Lee Brimelows’s WPFBlog since having a deep dive session into WPF last year so was keen to hear him talk and also showcase some of his prototypes.

Another area of interest was PHP and IIS7 since I’m also a huge fan of developing using PHP for web applications vs ASP.Net since its just easier to have an application that can move from a LAMP to Windows platform. Virtual map showed how they could (without writing any code) just port over their applications tradtionally hosted on LAMP to Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and IIS7.

Beau Ambur from Metaliq also did a session on their prototype built for MIX’07 earlier in the keynote so they expanded a little more on the lessons learnt in the afternoon session. Was quite technical in how they delved into the various technicalities of video aspect ratios and bitrates.

The last panel discussion for the day was on the Social Networking scene in Singapore. I’m pretty interested in this since helping out with SportsKaki has given an addtional incentive to look out for new opportunities for social networks. Strait’s Time’s Stomp was present as well as Singtel and MediaCorp. (Had to miss this session WHEN customer called in the middle of it!! Sigh…)

Only comment was that for an event to bring designers into the Microsoft solution platform, there didn’t seem that many sessions or topics that catered to address the huge base of designers that are mainly using Adobe tools at the moment. I think for now, Adobe Photoshop CS3 would still be the prefered choice of tool for pixel pushing while Blend would slowly edge into the web RIA space currently dominated by Flash.