I've just been to the Dutch Microsoft DevDays 2007, for me it was the first DevDays ever. It was a very interesting day full of presentations from all kinds of Microsoft hotshots.
Scott Guthrie opend the DevDays with a huge speech about
Silverlight, and together with some other experts and the
Microsoft Expression tool set, he build us a Silverlight application.
After Scott's demonstration we got a demo of an other application called Top Banana. Well that really impressed me. Top Banana is a video editing application pretty equal to Windows Movie Maker, only this one is build in Silverlight, in other words, totally web-based. You got to check out this demo video of Top Banana. It really proves Silverlight is a lot more then just a new Flash replacement.
After seeing 6 Vista driven laptop's crashing there software on different stage's (probably because of the high amount of beta software), i took a dive in to the reMix. The reMix is a little DevDays sidekick for the designers, with topics about GUI's, Media stuff and a lot of Silverlight. I went to the 'Internet Standards in IE7' presentation by Molly E. Holzschlag. Molly has written en lot of books standards and is involved with the development of IE. I learned a lot about the browser that is so loved by one and hated by the other. Since april this year IE7 is the most used browser in the world, and together with his predecessor IE6 is the main browser on 80% of all the PC's in the world. Molly sad that this was 1/12th of the whole human race using IE, this bring on a lot of responsibility for Microsoft. This was also the reason they didn't made IE7 100% compatible with the W3C web standards.
Further on i learned a lot about AJAX, web-components and operating system in dependable software development, and afterwards we got the opportunity chat with other DevDay visitors while having a beer.
Top Banana demo
Microsoft Silverlight