Fabric and loathing in Vegas: what happened at MS Mix
Silverlight 3 and the important of being IE 8
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Radio Reg Microsoft's Mix was intended to introduce developers to the company's cloud platform - Azure Services Platform. Just days before, though, Azure suffered its first outage - 22 hours of darkness.
Microsoft blamed an over-active Fabric Controller for the problem, saying it had taken down healthy server instances instead of just the server instances affected by a network problem.
Sounded suspiciously like the Azure Fabric Controller was learning, and testing our defenses.
It was noteworthy that this Mix saw Azure and Silverlight 3 overshadow the release of the next version of Microsoft’s browser - Internet Explorer 8. Azure and Silverlight also blurred IE in terms of raw sessions - more than 30 compared to four.
It was all so different two years, even a year back, when Microsoft used Mix to launch an IE 8 beta and tried to convince developers to get on board. Even Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer didn’t bother this time around.
In this latest MicroBite, The Register’s software editor Gavin Clarke and All-About-Microsoft blogger Mary-Jo Foley report from Mix, look at why IE took such low billing, and at how Microsoft's focus has shifted to Silverlight 3 and Azure.
Among this show's highlights:
- Microsoft’s search for legitimacy on IE 8 – why Microsoft turned to sponsored reports and its own research to support claims the browser is safer and faster than Firefox
- Why these reports are targeting the wrong people
- Microsoft’s IE chief stressed Microsoft is now committed to web standards on IE 8, and how that had one Mix Tweeter "rolling on the floor laughing my ass off"
- The company's finally going to be getting in Adobe's face with Silverlight 3, which delivers video and audio outside the browser
- How Azure's about to get a whole lot bigger - really quickly
- The coming war on the human race by
SkynetAzure
You can catch this week's show in the player below, or in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format.
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COMMENTS
RE: Best bit was Playboy!
For you, the highlight of a MS tech conference was MS using silicon boobies to convince people that silverlight is anywhere near finished?
Not sure who comes out worst off from that. You, or MS.
Best bit was Playboy!
MIX is a great conference, very relaxed and not at all Microsoft in feel - I don't think I've ever been to a Microsoft conference where in the keynote someone mentioned Playboy before! And yes, they even launched the site http://playboy.covertocover.com (50+ issues, one from each year, full text search enabled!) ... though they did leave it dark until the evening (I guess they wanted the audience to pay attention to the rest of the keynote and the sessions!)
Paris: for the articles

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