2007 was the sophomore effort for Microsoft’s MIX conference, and I must say, the sequel was better than the original. I spoke at MIX last year, when things like WPF and the Expression Suite were still in their infancy, and I think the audience approached new ideas with caution and skepticism. With Vista finally out the door and real-world applications and tools starting to mature, the vibe this year was one of strong interest and excitement. The products had already sold themselves; people were ready to dive in. Production quality was high, the keynote was tight, and the sessions were really well-thought out.

The announcements about Silverlight clearly stole the show. Having worked in WPF for several years now (and Flash for many more than that) it’s truly exciting to see the seeds of parity starting to be sown with regard to cross-platform deployment for .NET applications. I was highly skeptical of WPF/e when it was first shown at PDC 2005; it was so far from WPF that I was amazed it garnered that moniker ( “In-browser XAML-Lite” was more appropriate). Now that plans are under way to make a reasonable subset of the .NET framework run cross-browser and cross-platform, we’ve got a real contender in the works. Perf is impressive, media support is rich and the programming model is not too far from what I’ve come to expect from WPF.

I was also extremely impressed that Microsoft managed to make an alpha version of the player and an SDK available in time for the conference. I mean, we can actually start playing with this stuff, even though it will be probably more than a year before it’s ready for prime time (my best guess). Here’s the long and the short of it:

What you get:

• Canvas-based layout
• Solid cross-browser HTML DOM support
• Rudimentary controls
• HTTP networking + XML
• Web Service support
• LINQ
• Ruby & Python scripting via the DLR (insane!)

Noticeably absent (but in the works):

• TextBox control (for text input)
• Rich control set
• Layout management
• Databinding
• Styling

Nice-to-haves that aren’t planned for inclusion

• 3D
• Hardware acceleration

Unfortunately, my 3 favorite things about WPF (layout, styling and databinding) are the ones that have yet to be included in the platform. Basically this means there’s not much you can do in Silverlight 1.1 right now that can’t be done in Flash/Flex (tho 720p WMV streaming is soooo sweet). If you’re already familiar with XAML/C# (and there aren’t a lot of you out there), then you’re going to be able to dig in pretty quickly, but I don’t think there’s much here for advanced Flash devs that’s going to wow them. Fast forward to a year from now, and if Microsoft fills in the blanks per the roadmap, and you’ve got a cross-platform story that, IMO, is going to find a lot more devs building Silverlight apps than Flex apps. That said, Flash Player 9 is rapidly approaching 90% penetration, so Microsoft had best get crackin’ on building a user base.

I don’t have the full lowdown on what Moxie brings to the table, but I think that now that Microsoft and Adobe both have a declarative-markup-based programming model for UI development, we can officially say “It’s on!”.