Just finished watching (and still recovering from) the Mix keynote. I have the same feeling now that I had when I first saw Longhorn - this is going to be big and momentous. It should soon be available at VisitMix.com for your viewing pleasure.

I can finally talk about the mysterious feature No. 10 in Silverlight I alluded to here. It's a combination of two features actually
  1. A cross-platform .Net which runs on both Windows and Mac, runs inside the browser and all within a couple or so megabytes. When I first heard of this project several months ago, I didn't think it was possible to compress .Net down to such a size but these guys have sured proved me wrong.

  2. The Dynamic Language Runtime with IronPython and IronRuby being released under the Microsoft Permissive License (which lets people fork the code among other things). This also opens the door for any compiler writer to implement her dynamic language of choice.
You really have to take a second to absorb the impact of both the announcements put together. This really means you can use any one of the 30-odd languages of .Net (which now include IronPython and IronRuby) to write rich apps which run inside the browser. You also get the perf benefits of the CLR - Scott Guthrie spoke of how many orders of magnitude .Net code is faster than Javascript inside the browser.

This is some real wicked technology at play here.

Favourite quote
This probably sums up how a lot of people feel right now. Jason Mauer on Twitter
"ScottGu debugging a .NET app running in Safari on the Mac... that's the sound of thousands of people simultaneously crapping their pants"

via Jeff Sandquist

Notable links
  1. Silverlight official + community site
  2. Ryan Stewart's overview of today's announcements
  3. Silverlight screencasts
  4. ScottGu on the cross-platform CLR
  5. Techmeme conversation

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