Mix ‘09 just ended today. Microsoft announced some amazing stuff there. I’ve got some samples I’m working on to share with you, I just didn’t have enough time to finish them for a zero-day release. What am I excited about from Mix?

Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 has a lot of features that make it compelling not only as a Flash alternative in web scenarios, but the new out of browser experience presents a good case for using Silverlight as your default client framework. And the cross platform capabilities are just the icing on the cake. There are more goodies to talk about with Silverlight 3 as well, like:

• GPU acceleration complete with pixel shaders
• Perspective 3D (with full hit testing)
• Navigation and deep linking
• and a bunch more…check out Tim Heuer’s post for a full synopsis

RIA Services

I’m extremely excited about the scenarios enabled by the RIA Services Framework. RIA services acts as an application service layer between your UI and your application tier. There is a lot to talk about with this, but I like what I see, and so should the EF naysayers. I can’t do it justice here, but I do have a full post in the works about it. While you’re waiting, there’s a Hand’s On Lab for Ria.

Azure

There’s a lot to talk about with Azure from the announcement that SQL Data Services will support standard ADO.NET (and other TDS capable clients), to Windows Azure supporting PHP and Full-Trust code and beyond. I’ll save that info for my other blog.

Blend 3

There is not enough I can say about Blend 3! The WPF team has always talked about the Designer-Developer Workflow. Blend 3 takes it to another level. The most compelling feature of Blend 3 is Sketchflow. The best description I can give of Sketchflow is a digital storyboard for mocking up an application that happens to produce a working application. Trust me you’ve got to see this! There are a metric ton of other new features in Blend (and that’s just what’s in the Preview), but Sketchflow is the most intriguing to me.

So that’s what I’m excited about from Mix ‘09. What has you buzzing?