Ray Ozzie opened the keynotes today and gave a general intro to MIX07. This was a pretty general overview and focused a lot on the release of Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash competitor. It was an interesting talk, but was mostly benign.

After that, Scott Guthrie came up and that’s when the really good stuff started. Lots of great announcements:

• Silverlight is out, released for download just a little bit ago.
• Silverlight comes with a cross-platform .NET framework that runs in the browser. With that comes a lot of interesting things:
  • Initial support is for Firefox, IE, and Safari. Yes, it runs on Mac.
  • You can now write client-side code on any Silverlight-enabled browser in any .NET language you like.
  • Client-side code in .NET has HTML DOM access including all of the browser components (status bar, etc.) and runs thousands of times faster than JavaScript.
  • There are robust data services including LINQ and caching built-in.
• There’s a new service called Silverlight Streaming that lets you upload your Silverlight application and assets, up to 4GB, and Microsoft will host it for free. That’s a huge bandwidth-saver for folks wanting to use Silverlight to stream video, etc.
• New Visual Studio (Orcas) feature - Core CLR Remote Cross-Platform Debugging. You can runtime debug a Silverlight application executing in a browser on another machine, including remote debugging to a Safari instance on a Mac. This is huge. Guthrie demonstrated one of these sessions, intercepting events and changing values in the debug session on the fly and those values get real-time updated in the target session. Very, very cool.
• Silverlight projects seem to work like other Visual Studio projects, including the ability to “Add Web Reference” and have your Silverlight applications call web services.
• If you have a web application project in Visual Studio, you can put that in the same solution as your Silverlight app and then select “Add Silverlight Link” to your web application. When you build your web app, the Silverlight app automatically rebuilds and deploys.
• The dynamic language support in .NET is growing. They’ve got support for Python and JavaScript and are adding official support for Ruby via IronRuby. They’ll be releasing that source just like IronPython.
• This dynamic language support has an additional meaning - you can write your Silverlight apps in any of those languages as well. And, again, they’ll run cross-platform. Huge.
• It installs in like three seconds. The demo showed a user experience for someone coming to a Silverlight app and not having the plugin installed. From the point where the user clicks the “Install” link to the point where the app is running was about three seconds. It was super fast.
• After Summer 07 they’ll be adding even better mobile support. It has pretty good support now (also demonstrated) but I guess they’re adding more.

There seems to be a big focus on delivering video with Silverlight. Most of the demos they showed involved integrating video. It does a lot more than that, and I can envision a lot of cool XAML based apps I could write, but there’s a huge video push, going so far as having NetFlix come in and demonstrate an application where you can watch movies on-demand.

The Silverlight community site is at http://www.silverlight.net. Check it out.