For those not fortunate enough to attend MIX09 I thought you’d like to see what came in the Schwag Bag.

It’s some nice stuff including Sketching User Experiences by keynote speaker Bill Buxton. But the crown jewel, in my humble opinion, is this sweet notebook complete with MIX schedule.

I really wish I had the energy to write a thoughtful piece about MIX09. But to be honest, it’s been more of a whirlwind than I had anticipated. After a 5 hour flight from Boston put us in Las Vegas at 1:30am, there was a mixup with my room. As it turned out, the first two rooms that I was assigned were already occupied. Of course I didn’t find this out until I walked into each one. It did teach me that people don’t appreciate strangers walking into their hotel rooms at 2:00 am though. Oops.

On the upside, after 2 return trips to the front desk I was upgraded to a pimp suite on the 32nd floor. As I’m writing this I’m sitting in the living room of a 4 room suite with 3 HD TV’s, 3 sinks, 2 bathrooms a Jacuzzi and full bar. Life is good.

One thing I can say is that the most impressive part of day was the keynote piece about SketchFlow in Expression Blend 3. I really can’t wait to get back to the office and start working with it.

Here are some random photos from the day, and a gratuitous shot of the suite. More later.

Wow. I can’t wait to start prototyping with SketchFlow and SketchFlow Player in Expression Blend 3.

Is it me, or is the timing of the iPhone 3.0 announcement a little dubious? I’m not usually one to put on the tinfoil hat. But deciding on Thursday to make a major announcement the day of the MIX09 kickoff smells like someone is starved for attention.

Remember the early days of WPF/E when the promise was of a truly open development system? Eclipse4SL from Soyatec gets us one step closer to that promise land.

The Eclipse Tools for Microsoft Silverlight Project will integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE and Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

Found this today while looking at Virtual Earth integration. Sounds perfect.

InfoStrat.VE allows WPF and Microsoft Surface developers to take full advantage of Virtual Earth 3D with minimal overhead. Simply reference the dll, add a single VEMap control to your XAML, and you have a map! The control eliminates the Win32 Interop restrictions, so you can do everything with this VE control that you could do with any native WPF control, including:

• Overlay items (no more transparent windows!)
• Rotate and transform the map within the interface (no more boring rectangles, bring on the 360 degree interfaces!)
• Use the map within a Visual Brush (you know you want faded reflections!)

Kirpa has a great article on Dependency Properties here and a nice little Silverlight Dependency Property generator here.

Jason Zander, General Manager for the Visual Studio team, has posted some early screenshots of the new Visual Studio 2010 UI to his Blog. The updated UI is built on WPF and sports a new color pallet and nice clean design.

Download Microsoft Expression Media 2 Service Pack 2 here.
According to the Expression Media site this is the list of updates/fixes.

• Importing several large images at the same time is very slow.
• XML export and import may scramble custom fields.
• Catalogs saved from a Macintosh computer lose file paths to the original media if they are opened from a server on a computer running Windows.
• Original file paths are used instead of new file paths when you are copying items to a new catalog.
• Silverlight 2.0 is not detected correctly by Mozilla Firefox browsers when you are viewing Silverlight HTML galleries.
• Thumbnails do not use the embedded color profile of a file (thumbnails must be rebuilt to see the fix).
• User preference for the rendering engine is not always used.
• After you sort in List view, right-clicking a file to open it in a default application opens the wrong file.
• Moving hierarchical keywords may incorrectly apply flat keywords to images.
• Running scripts on annotations garbles text by inserting Unicode characters.
• File paths are broken if the imported folder contains more than 1,024 subfolders.
• Reset Paths may fail when setting a path to the root of a drive.
• Expression Media 2 may crash when importing a file from a folder that has been removed from the Organize panel.
• Expression Media 2 may crash when you cancel an import and then subsequently import files from the root of a drive.
• Renaming a folder on a network share may fail and the folder may disappear from Organize panel.
• Files with names that have more than 64 characters are always imported again when you update folders in the Organize panel.
• In saved catalogs, additional folders are not added in the Organize panel when the disk volume name is the system default. Typically, the system default is “Local Disk.”
• TIFF RAW files from Phase One Digital Backs appear large in file size within a catalog.
• Random numbers may display on catalog folders if the disk doesn’t have a volume name.
• HTML gallery links display question marks when viewed in Mozilla Firefox browsers.

Impressive video from TechFest demonstrating a research project where multiple sources of real time video are ’stitched’ together to create a large panoramic scene. Almost like PhotoSynth for Video.