MIX09: Day 1 Keynote Announcements

Microsoft made a list of announcements today at the MIX09 conference during the keynote addressed by Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform and Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research. Of all the announcements made today, Silverlight 3 was a pretty big announcement. To know more about Silverlight 3, you can read our overview here.

In the other news, Microsoft is announcing a nice win for its Silverlight video and animation plug-in for browsers. NBC will use Siverlight 3 to stream the 2010 Winter Olympics event in 720p HD.

Microsoft Research has released a translation widget that allows users to translate web pages into other languages. The widget offers users a drop-down menu to translate their Web site into other languages without having to leave the page. The translation widget is available at the Microsoft Translator website here.

Even though MIX is all about web designers and web developers, Windows Mobile 6.5 was not an exception. Windows Mobile 6.5 will now have a widget engine, allowing applications built from HTML and javascript to run using the IE 6 Mobile engine, which enables the widgets to use flash and other ActiveX controls available on the device. The full screen app-like widgets will contain the zipped HTML, javascript and graphics files.

WorldWide Telescope which was released last year by Microsoft Research is now made available via browser using the Silverlight technology. You can tour the galaxy in your browser here. Not quite as rich as the Windows client, but very cool nonetheless!

Cross browser testing has always being a pain and most of the developers run separate virtual machines for IE6, IE7 and IE8 as they cant be installed alongside. Microsoft has released a tool which can make this task more easier. Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your Web sites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.