OK... so here comes my Mix07 Keynote recap.

A few BIG announcements

1.       Silverlight as of beta 1 (released today with a Go Live License) has .NET framework support. This support is cross browser (IE and Firefox) and cross platform (Safari on the Mac). This is huge.

2.       Microsoft announced Silverlight Streaming. http://silverlight.live.com . This allows developers to store up to 4GB of sub 10 minute videos and associated Silverlight applications into the Microsoft supported Content Distribution Network (think Akamai). This is FREE!

3.       Microsoft announced IronRuby for .NET. This will compile down to IL like anything else and the Dynamic Language IL will run on both Mac and PC inside Silverlight. ScottGu did a great demo with everything happening on the mac. From writing XAML to writing Ruby code. Compilation happening inside Silverlight.

4.       Expression Studio shipped today... I’m coming back to NZ with a special commemorative copy- the Expression team had 1500 completely unique designs put together for the boxes J

Here is some more detail gleamed from the Keynote and some other connections within DevDiv@ Microsoft.

Sililverlight Beta 1 incl Go Live. Final release will ship this summer.

 Silverlight includes cross platform .NET in the browser. Uses the same CLR that ships with full framework-  it has the same JIT, GC and type-system that you have with desktop .NET apps today.  It means that it loads and can run the same compiled assemblies that are used with the .NET Framework today- subject to it not quite having the full framework at its disposal- i.e. som namespaces are missing.

Seeing performance of up to 1000 times faster than Javascript- showed a great Demo with a Chess AI algorithm compared in Javascript and C#. 8 to 20 times faster than ActionScript.

Silverlight includes a subset of WPF from desktop.

Silverlight supports HTML DOM Integration- you can use any .NET language to build AJAX stuff rather than having to use Javascript. So basically you can wire up VB/C#/Ruby/Python event handlers to HTML elements like you would do with Javascript.

We FINALLY have debugging of browser code to rival (read spank the pants off) Mozilla....Not only is there support for running CLR stuff on the Mac.... Also support for debugging applications on the mac- you can remotely attach the debugger to the Macintosh over the network and step through the code!

Still a little unclear on the SOAP support. I know it doesn’t support WS* or WCF. I didn’t thnk it supported soap (only REST/POX/JSON) but I’m still digging on whether it will support  SOAP.

Silverlight has full LINQ (it includes System.Core so it will support all the .NET 3.5 stuff in that) support and an offline data cache.

Silverlight plugn is a 4MB download. Install is a 2 second task.

While not announced they showed a version of Silverlight running on Windows Mobile- may well see this announced @ MEDC later this week.... I’m trying to find out more about this RIGHT NOW. If it is true then I have a great application to put together right now.

There is no Audio or Video capture in Silverlight v1.

There is currently lack of support for a number of key WPF features... These sould be available and baked into the final version.... Definitely missing are: databinding, layout manager, styles and templating.

Codec support includes WMV, MP3, VC-1 and H263 video. Silverlight will NOT support additional Codecs that users might have installed.